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Computer Science at Sonoma State

The Computer Science Department at Sonoma State University provides a cutting-edge curriculum with an emphasis on hands-on experience. Our small classes, teaching-focused faculty, strong student clubs and community come together to make learning a fun, interesting, and valuable experience.

The CS Department was founded in 1982. It currently consists of 5 full-time permanent tenured or tenure-track faculty, 6 adjunct faculty, and approximately 125 undergraduate Computer Science majors and minors. Sonoma State University is surrounded by leading industrial organizations in telecom, biotech, and other computer and technological fields.

The CS Department offers degree programs leading to a Bachelor of Science or a Minor in Computer Science. The CS Department strives to provide students with a broad, fundamental background in computer science which will enable them, upon graduation, to work in industry, pursue graduate study, or both.
Our curriculum is aligned with the latest recommendations of the Association for Computing Machinery and includes core coursework in programming, hardware design, computer architecture, database management, software engineering, operating systems, programming languages, and foundations of theoretical computer science. Elective courses are offered in artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, compiler design, embedded systems, graphics, malware, networking and the internet, parallel programming, data compression, game programming, security, wireless networks, and other areas. Additional study in elective areas, internship experience, independent projects and individual research with CS faculty is encouraged.

The Department maintains its own laboratory facilities, which include student labs of G4s triple booting in OSX, Windows, and Linux, of PCs running Linux and Windows, multiple servers, and facilities for embedded systems and networking.

The Department hosts a thriving intellectual interchange with its weekly Computer Science Colloquium lecture series.