"They switch to a philosophy major."
This comment seems odd to me, as philosophy is another subject where a failure to sit down and really think about the topics at hand will leave you hopelessly lost, if the class is taught to any degree of rigor.
This comment seems odd to me, as philosophy is another subject where a failure to sit down and really think about the topics at hand will leave you hopelessly lost, if the class is taught to any degree of rigor.
The first reason is that these were first-class leading-edge thinkers we were trying to understand. Aristotle is very densely packed with content, and we had to read and re-read passages to penetrate them. (Some think that the writings we have of Aristotle are actually class notes, and may not be a good representation of his lecture style.) The second reason is that even though Computer Science is an abstract subject, code is more concrete and graspable than a philosophical idea because you can compile and execute the code and see if and how it works. Philosophical ideas are either difficult to test (e.g. ethics) or practically impossible to test (metaphysics).
However, I'm willing to bet it was just snark.
I never asked why. They both were having trouble in the Intro Algorithms class when they bounced.
Maybe people that think they are CS/Math people and then find out that they might not be CS/Math people find solace in Philosophy? Maybe what they liked about CS/Math was the logic more than the algorithms.
It's surprisingly common in my personal experience.
http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/admissions/ugrad/Computer_Science...