[Coda]

I never took statistics. More empirically-oriented sciences require statistics credits, but I just sort of picked up statistics knowledge incidentally during other more general math courses. I'm not sure if I could meaningfully advise on it; my intuition says it's something you could skip, but I don't want to state that authoritatively.

I've never heard of an AP problem solving class. That DOES sound interesting.

AP Computer Science is... actually rather bland. The content is important, to be sure, but it's very mechanical. And unless they've changed how the class is taught since I took it, you're going to be scrambling to keep up at the beginning if you don't already know how to write some simple programs. (When I took it, there were two other programming classes as prerequisites.) The advantage to taking AP CS is more that it lets you take the more interesting CS courses sooner. I will say I'm GLAD that I took the class, because even though I'd been programming for ten years by the time I took it and the programs I wrote were way below my level, learning and understanding the formalisms really helped. But I wouldn't go so far as to call it "fun." Then again, someone with less experience than I had going in might not be put off by the simplicity.

I took 23 hours my freshman year. ("Full time" is 12 hours minimum; most students that aren't also working a job take 15-18. I think degree programs are usually balanced so you have to take 15 every semester in order to graduate in 4 years.) It took special permission to go over the usual limit, but I THRIVED on that load. It meant I stayed engaged instead of falling into the usual freshman trap of learning time management the hard way. I wish I could have kept up that pace in subsequent years, but prerequisite requirements limited what classes I could take and I couldn't justify paying for random elective courses that wouldn't contribute to my degree.