Computational Social Science Minor

All courses, faculty listings, and curricular and degree requirements described herein are subject to change or deletion without notice.

The Minor

The interdisciplinary minor in computational social science (CSS) at UC San Diego combines formal causal models from the social sciences with statistics, programming, and large-scale data analysis. Students enrolled in the minor will take three courses in computational social science and at least four upper-division electives, comprising twenty-eight total units of which at least twenty (five courses) must be upper division. Upper-division courses may be selected from among the following courses. At least two courses must be taken from departments that are not the department of the student’s major. Students may petition to receive credit for courses not listed below. Advising for the minor is housed in the Department of Psychology.

Students are advised to strongly consider MATH 10A-B-C or MATH 20A-B-C and MATH 18 as preparation for upper-division electives.

Core Courses

CSS 1. Introductory Programming for Computational Social Science (4)

CSS 2. Data and Model Programming for Computational Social Science (4)

CSS 100. Advanced Analytic Programming for Computational Social Science (4)

All core courses toward the minor must be taken for a letter grade.

Elective Courses

Choose four courses from the list below

ANAR 104. Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for Anthropologists and Archaeologists (4)

COGS 108. Data Science in Practice (4)

COGS 109. Modeling and Data Analysis (4)

COGS 118D. Mathematical Statistics for Behavioral Data Analysis (4)

COGS 119. Programming for Experimental Research (4)

COGS 123. Social Computing (4)

COGS 144. Social Cognition (4)

ECON 120A. Econometrics A (4)

ECON 120B. Econometrics B (4)

ECON 120C. Econometrics C (4)

ECON 125. Demographic Analysis and Forecasting (4)

ECON 176. Marketing (4)

ECON 178. Economic and Business Forecasting (4)

LIGN 165. Computational Linguistics (4)

LIGN 167. Deep Learning of Natural Language Understanding (4)

POLI 100F. Social Networks (4)

POLI 171. Making Policy with Data (4)

POLI 172. Advanced Social Data Analytics (4)

PSYC 193.* Topics in Psychology: Data Analysis and Visualization in R (4)

PSYC 193.* Topics in Psychology: Advanced Quantitative Methods (4)

SOCI 102. Network Data and Methods (4)

SOCI 103M. Computer Applications to Data Management in Sociology (4)

SOCI 109. Analysis of Sociological Data (4)

USP 189.* Special Topics in Urban Planning: Urban Data Science (4)

USP 191. GIS for Urban and Community Planning (4)

* Course topics vary; course will only count toward the minor when the topic matches that listed. Other topics may be petitioned.

Of the four elective courses toward the minor, at least three must be taken for a letter grade. Up to one elective toward the minor may be taken P/NP.

A GPA of at least 2.0 in the CSS minor is required for graduation with the minor. At least four upper-division courses toward the minor must be taken at UC San Diego.