Fundamental Structures of Computer Science I

CS 201 is where you stop thinking about C++ as a language and start thinking about how the choice of data structure determines whether your program runs in seconds or hours — it's the first real exposure to algorithmic thinking, built around time and space trade-offs. You'll spend the semester implementing lists, stacks, and queues from scratch in C++ (wrestling with pointers and dynamic memory along the way), analyzing their complexity, and turning in four programming homeworks plus a written midterm and final. Everything downstream — CS 202, algorithms, systems courses — assumes you came out of here fluent in pointers, recursion, and Big-O reasoning, so this is the gate course that actually separates "can code" from "can engineer software."