Since Northwestern introduced its artificial intelligence minor in Sept. 2024, faculty have expanded course offerings and refined the curriculum to help students explore how AI connects to their other fields of study.
The minor, which includes classes on AI development and design, is open to NU students of all backgrounds and disciplines with the exception of students pursuing a major in Computer Science at Weinberg or McCormick. McCormick Prof. Sara Owsley Sood said the program might be of interest to students who want to understand how AI will shape the future of their fields.
“This is not just teaching you how to use AI tools, because anyone can pick up those tools,” Sood said. “What this is teaching you is how the systems work and maybe some insight into the breadth of what artificial intelligence is.”
Since the minor’s launch last fall, one student has graduated with an AI minor, 44 have declared and are currently pursuing it, and another 101 are in the process of declaring, according to the computer science department’s enrollment data. Roughly half of the students pursuing the minor are McCormick students.
To complete the minor, students have to take four prerequisite math courses and eight computer science units, including three upper-level electives.
Sood said the minor was created after department heads observed a growing number of students who, while not declaring the computer science major, were going through the introduction sequence and taking upper-level AI and machine learning courses. She said the goal was to provide a way for students to signal their AI expertise to the outside world.
“In the world we live in right now, AI is everywhere,” Sood said. “Knowledge of AI systems, the guts of AI algorithms and machine learning algorithms is useful to be applied to any field.”
Since the minor launched, Sood said the department has hired new faculty and added classes based on their areas of expertise.
Beyond increasing elective options, she said they are constantly iterating on and improving their courses.
“The team of faculty that teaches those courses meet regularly to make sure that we’re meeting student needs, and so you might see small shifts in the courses based on that,” Sood said. “But fundamentally, the (objective of the) minor has not changed in the last year.”
When McCormick Prof. Samir Khuller began his undergraduate studies in computer science in 1982, the field was relatively new, so everyone received nearly identical training.
However, he said times have changed.
Khuller said students can tailor their degree to their individual interests, and the creation of the AI minor creates another avenue for this.
“The field has grown so much,” Khuller said. “Cybersecurity was not a word in use when I was a student. Machine learning was not a word in use at that time… So the creation of specializations as well as the AI minor is basically meant to signal to a certain employer what background the student has.”
Weinberg junior Mackenzie Tyson said she signed up for the minor when it launched last year after her computer science professor recommended it in class.
As a political science major, Tyson had originally considered pursuing a computer science minor, but chose AI instead because it felt more specialized — especially as she grew more interested in the overlap between AI and policy work.
Tyson said the AI minor is a great option for her because she is more interested in studying AI concepts than in developing hard skills like coding or programming.
“The intersection I’m really interested in is the idea or concept of ethical AI use, and how, as artificial intelligence is being developed, it can be integrated into society in an ethical way,” she said. “I think it’s just really important to understand these tools.”
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