I'd also recommend the other two of the "big three" computer science electives - Compiler Design, and Computer Graphics. You can skip most of the rest of the CS major, but no matter how good a programmer you think you are, you'll get something out of those 3 courses.

And I'll second the bit about TAing, though my experience was in physics rather than CS. Being a physics lab TA is cool...you get to play with all sorts of stuff. (Heck, taking physics labs is cool, though the lab reports are not so cool.)

I was a graphics geek in college... you could skip it, but you'd be skipping some really fun code.

But OS... if you don't know that stuff you're basically worthless.

My school, the University of Pittsburgh, somehow tricked the accreditation board into thinking that our physics computer labs (where we solved problems that were typed into Excel) were equivalent to an actual physics lab.

Is Statistical Mechanics worth learning?

It was wrapped up together with Waves, Optics, and Thermal Physics at my college (and then I think they redid the curriculum the year after I passed through and pulled it out). The parts that I saw definitely seemed worth learning - you learn that pop-science concepts like entropy and temperature actually have precise mathematical definitions in terms of the states of the individual particles. You also learn a bunch of nifty mathematical tricks for dealing with Really Big Numbers.

Actually, I'd probably recommend it more for someone planning to go into finance, economics or history (!!) rather than someone going into physics or CS, unless you're going into a subfield directly related to stat mech. Most of my physics coursework has been basically useless for my computer programming; yeah, it's nifty to know your vectors and rotation matrices (particularly if you go into graphics), but I've never had to solve a volume integral or contract a tensor since dropping my physics major.

I'm curious how many credits your OS course was. I have friends at CMU and OS is a 12 credit class. You build a Unix-like kernel from scratch with a partner. An "A" in OS guarantees a six figure programming job at graduation.

It was 1.5. The lab was .5 credit (a class a credit where I went). It was, as far as I know, the only class in the whole university where the lab was a separately credited part.

Organic Chem - 1 credit.

OS - 1.5

So, for both of you, those numbers don't mean much to the rest of us.

How many credit hours is considered a full time load at your schools?

At CMU OS is actually a 36 unit course, which can be converted to 12 credits at most USA schools, where 12 credits is full time, 15 credits is normal, and 18 credits is the max.

So the CMU OS course is equivalent to four normal classes.

That's impressive. So that's pretty much the only class you take that quarter?

My understanding was that most CMU students overloaded and took a bunch of classes anyways.

BUT... but I just looked up the class at CMU and it is not 12 credits. It is 4 credits. Which shakes my worldview somewhat, I thought this 12 credit was proof that the CMU CS curriculum was something special.

So either I was mislead by my friend at CMU years ago when this course came up in discussion or more likely, I misunderstood him. Feel free to downmod my post above, it would ideally settle out around 0 points for containing wrong information. Sorry for spreading untruths...

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