Math and the Computer Science Major – Very true. To do CS you need to understand the math, a lot of math. I’ve always loved math — in theory — but was never especially good at the higher-level stuff. And don’t ask me to remember any of my high school calculus… Anyway, knowing I wasn’t going to be able to handle the math without a terribly and death-defying struggle was one of the top reasons I didn’t do CS at Brandeis. Another was that the department just wasn’t the least bit practical — I worked with people who were senior CS majors and didn’t know the first thing about SQL and couldn’t pick up how to write the most basic Tcl. I’m sure they could calculate algorithms up the wazoo and dreamt in big-O, but that wasn’t the least bit helpful when it came to writing a web application. Or, for that matter, a shell script.