[gliese1337]

  > I was tempted to switch into art history
  > to escape the huge engineering workload.

My association with friends in the fine arts indicates that that would've been a horrible decision; probably depends on what college/university you're at, but while engineering majors seem to have a pretty consistently high workload, visual design, music composition, and art history majors seem to get periodically slammed with horrendously massive workloads.

I thought about switching to animation for a while, and then realized that there's no way I could handle the load in the introductory-level classes. I suspect it's because there're lots of people who would like to do fine arts, so they make all of the 100-levels incredibly intense to filter in just the ones who are really talented and dedicated.

Sometimes I wish they'd do the same thing with the CS department.

  > Computer science is impossible to engage
  > with on a casual basis. It requires a massive
  > and highly focused investment of time and
  > energy, ideally with the world’s best teachers
  > guiding you at the same time.

I believe this to be true as far as the theoretical, mathematics-based discipline of computer science goes. But it should be noted that you can become a fantastic programmer with very little formal CS background and casual engagement.

[_delirium]

I suspect it's because there're lots of people who would like to do fine arts, so they make all of the 100-levels incredibly intense to filter in just the ones who are really talented and dedicated. Sometimes I wish they'd do the same thing with the CS department.

This used to be somewhat traditional, to have a hardcore 100-level CS class as a weed-out, but my impression is that curricula are moving away from it. Partly, there's a worry that it mainly rewards how much knowledge you have coming into college: if the CS-101 course is really hardcore, the people who pass it are those who learned a lot about computer science on their own in high school. But if the university is supposed to provide an education program that can teach CS to people who don't already know it, that isn't quite what you want.

It also tends to work directly against universities' recruiting goals: they're spending all this effort to try to convince "non-traditional" CS majors (i.e. people who weren't already high-school computer enthusiasts) that it's an interesting and useful field to study, in which case you don't want to immediately kick them out in the first semester for not already being proficient enough.

[kabdib]

And you don't need much hardware investment; practically any miserable computer of the last decade will challenge you enough. In fact, having a shit-hot workstation to do your exploratory programming on might be bad for you. (Of course, I'm an old fart about this -- carved bits out of mother stone, hand-cranked our ALUs, etc.)