I’ll try answer your questions about the humanities as best I can, @drblack .
@drblack I actually came in thinking I was going to be premed (well, I put down on my application I was gonna be premed) but then decided ultimately that it’s just not the path for me. Freshman are given Pre-Major advisors that also assist you with figuring out what path you want to go on, and your freshman dorms usually have an Academic Advisor that you can go to anytime during their office hours to talk about classes, majors, what you’re interested in, etc. Trust me–a lot of people come in undecided and there are a lot of resources you can draw from to figure out what you want to do. On top of that, dorm staff (like Resident Advisors and Resident Computer Consultants and Peer Health Educators) are upperclassmen, and are always a great source of advice. IMO, I think if you know where to go and who to talk to, it isn’t hard to eventually figure out what you want to do and what you want to try. To answer your question, it’s totally fine to come in not knowing what you want to do. Stanford’s a great place to try out a ton of things–I know one of my friends hasn’t even fully decided what she wants to do. You have time to try classes, but this is something they don’t tell you–you have to move quickly if you want to fulfill major requirements before you graduate. The best resources, though? The upperclassmen. Talk to your RAs and RAs’ friends. They’re your best bet for getting real, solid Stanford advice.
Journalism and the humanities majors though–I’m not familiar with them, but I know a few friends who are into the humanities and they’re having a great time. Lots of essays, from what I see, and their class size is small, but they do enjoy themselves. If you’re into journalism, try out for the Stanford Daily.
@Planner I’ll do my best to answer your questions as thoroughly as I can, but if you have anymore questions, let me know.
I think the atmosphere here is pretty great and supportive. Laidback, yes, but duck syndrome (IMO) is a thing here. A lot of people just seem really chill on the outside but make no mistake, it’s tough here. Engineering/techie majors have hard and time-pressured classes (cramming everything into 10 weeks that most schools do in a semester…it’s fast-paced here. Quarter system is no joke). Within the classes, if you go to office hours for CS classes anyway, I always found a really cooperative and chilled environment. People in office hours are always cool to hang out with because they’re struggling just like you and we found a common way to bond over that, haha. People are always willing to help out. You just have to reach out and talk to them–I would say collaboration and working together on problem sets is pretty common (do watch the Honor Code though. Some classes allow collaboration and some don’t). However, I have seen my fair share of techies that are really startup-focused. Some seem to think they’ll be like the next big thing in Silicon Valley. They’re admirable, but sometimes the startup culture here gets…tiring. For me, anyway. It’s not always in your face, like I personally see the relaxed and collab environment more than I do the startup-ers, but it just depends on who you hang out with.
Again, to answer your question about how people interact when not talking about CS, they do pretty well. Campus life is vibrant and tons of events are held often. It’s definitely easy to find friends who aren’t CS majors, or even want to talk about CS. Freshman dorms in particular make a strong effort to bring freshmen to events to connect.
How much free time do CS students have? That depends on the CS student. Some CS’ers I know of can finish assignments very quickly and have free time to do other things. Others take a long time. It just depends on how you schedule your classes and workload and extracurriculars that defines your free time. Personally, if you’re taking more than 2 engineering classes per quarter, you won’t have a lot of free time. I took a physics class, a math class, and a CS class in one quarter and I nearly died from work overload lol. Had no free time whatsoever. Most quarters though, I’ve had tons of free time to pursue my part time job and extracurriculars and playing video games/hanging with friends.
Social life of CS’ers, on a scale of 1-10…It really depends on what kind of person you are and what classes you take. Some CS’ers have a hugely active social life, attend parties, go to San Fran almost every week, participate in dance groups, acapella, etc. Some, like me (I’m on the introverted side) gain their social interaction from chilling and helping people out at office hours, and then spend most of my time relaxing in my dorm or hanging outside with the nice weather, etc. [I can answer more of your questions about time-intensive classes, if you’d like].
@james111 It’s very easy to declare CS. I declared a few months ago and it took me a total of 5 minutes. And, hahaha, it’s so easy to find an advisor, believe me. When you take CS classes here, most of the intro CS lecturers (like Keith Schwarz, Julie Zelenski, Mehran Sahami, Jerry Cain), if you bond with them during office hours it’s not hard to want one of them to be your advisor (most of them say yes, anyway). And you can always change your advisor later. In fact, you don’t even need to know them personally to ask an intro CS lecturer to be your advisor. You could just go up to them, ask, [they’ll probably say yes] and then that’s it. You fill out a form, go to the CS Major Advisor, and then boom, you’re declared. You get some cool free gear too lol.
There are no prereqs to fulfill to declare. You could declare day 1 freshman year if you wanted to. There’s no GPA requirement either. Declaring isn’t hard, trust me. There are no requirements for declaring (that I’m aware of).