I'm in grad school at a university that was one of the first to have a software engineering accredited program. My undergrad is in CS. An employer recently recruited at our university and hired 5 SE majors. None of them were CS. Do employers prefer software engineering majors?

The reason I ask is because I can focus on many different areas during my graduate studies and really want to take the classes that will help me land a great job. Right now I'm either going to use CUDA and parallelize an advanced ray-tracer for a graduate project or do research on non-photo-realistic rendering in augmented reality. Pursuing these would leave very little SE classes in my schedule.

If I went the software engineering route, I would probably either do research into data-oriented programming or software design complexity.

Sometimes I think when I'm 40 and look back will it matter at all? For some reason I'm thinking not.