[brudgers]

A girl I dated in high-school wound up with a degree in agriculture - she wasn't from a rural area, and none of her grandparents had even lived on a farm - at my age that's going back to the early part of the 20th century.

She had started out as a math major.

The biggest negative for a young person is pursuing something they have no passion for. The dilemma of college for most young people is that they have little idea what a field entails until they arrive on campus and start taking courses - and even those who do have applicable knowledge of the reality still don't know about many of their other options.

So why do you want to major in CS?

[gschiller]

I want to be an entrepreneur and CS seems the clearest path to that.

[dsymonds]

That seems like a terrible approach. Why not major in business or economics?

[nostrademons]

CS is a better major for an entrepreneur than either business or economics. Marc Andreesen recommends engineering or other hard sciences:

http://sloentrepreneur.wordpress.com/2008/02/10/the-pmarca-g...

(My former cofounder was a psych undergrad + MBA, my girlfriend is a business undergrad + MBA, and I've got many more startup offers from people wanting to found companies with me than either of them.)

[keiferski]

If and ONLY if you want to start a tech startup. CS is relatively useless if you want to start a restaurant, fashion label, or virtually any business not related to technology.

[nostrademons]

That's true, but I doubt that the OP would be posting on "Hacker News" if he wanted to start a restaurant, fashion label, or virtually any business not related to technology.

[t0]

You really need CS and Business. Learn the other in your free time or take both.

[brudgers]

The clearest path to entrepreneurship is starting and running a business - e.g. mowing lawns, selling tee shirts, etc. The blunt truth is it also helps to come from wealth and have entrepreneurs in the family tree.

That's not to say that there are not other paths, but entrepreneurship works well in the Bill Gates model - he and Allen were in the software business in high school.

A business which fell out of their passion for programming. If Gates had followed the money as a teenager, he probably would have gone into the family business - law.

Good luck.