I came into Mudd just knowing my major will be in engineering. But, after my experiences in CS5, I've began to reconsider my options, partly because I haven't taken an engineering course yet, and don't know what it is like, but also because CS sometimes can be so damn fun! I don't know, for example, we learned about all kinds of data compression algorithms that are actually used in data compression today. I never really knew how these things worked, but in class, we not only learned how the algorithms worked, but we also got to apply the algorithms and write programs ourselves. Sure, there are times when much of the work done in CS homework is somewhat boring, but sometimes, just sometimes, a homework problem could interest me, and I would just think about how to solve it nonstop. For example, we got to write a Huffman encoder and decoder in python. It was a problem that had many obstacles, and was the biggest program we've written yet. There were parts that I couldn't figure out how to implement for a while, and the whole problem really made me begin to put what I've learned to good use. Also, the fact that it was something that is used in real life by people brought up my interest level (the algorithm is used in both MP3 and JPEG files).
Now, I'm thinking, perhaps CS would be a viable major for me, not only for the interesting challenges, but also just for the chance in getting a job at Google/Apple. Hence, I've finally decided to learn ObjC, and hopefully will begin to write some interesting stuff.