I should explain - I'm in the UK and, at least when I was at University, there was very little that was optional in CS course I did (at least for 3 years of the 4). So the class given by the Electrical Engineering department on mucking about with stuff like UARTs was as required as the Lambda Calculus course - all CS students had to pass both.

[Amusingly, networking was one of the optional 4th year classes - but in the pre-intraweb days nobody seem to regard it as very important...]