<p>I'm more accustomed to the British system where you specialise at an early age </p>
<p>I take it I have to do a certain amount of electives a year to meet my credit requirement? I honestly don't want to go back to the days of GCSE where I had to take Biology and other useless subjects (it's not useless, I just hated it :p ). </p>
<p>If it's a way of broadening my horizons in a low pressure environment then great, but in my mind, it sounds like the early years of my high school where I had to take a range of 'respectable subjects' to stand a good chance of getting into a good university. Thus I had to mix my sciences with my humanities and I just hated having to switch my thought processes. </p>
<p>If it was up to me, I'd stick with purely taking Mathematics/Statistics and Economics courses.</p>
<p>Both those majors are in CAS. You will have to take a good number of courses to broaden your horizons. If you simply want to be restricted to the requirements for your major, join the presidential scholar program / engineering school.</p>
<p>Even in the Arts and Sciences, though, you have a lot of ability to choose what particular electives interest you. Now, everyone has to take 1-2 freshman writing seminars, and no college can change this, and you will have to either learn a foreign language or place into a 2nd year course in one you already know, but beyond that it’s quite straightforward. Once you get to the point that you only have to fulfill distribution requirements and major requirements (I was there after one semester from AP English and language placement test), you really just choose from what science and liberal arts courses interest you. Since you are looking at math/econ, I can tell you that econ will automatically knock out 2 of the 5 liberal arts courses since they are considered SBA, while the math courses will knock out 2 of the 4 science courses. So now all you would have to do, after fulfilling your language and FWS’s, is find 3 history, literary, cultural, or philosophical courses to take and 2 science courses. I’m sure you could manage doing this over 4 years, especially with the broad selection of courses Cornell offers for things like this.</p>
<p>You can pursue the College Scholar Program and get the same kind of program of study. This program exists for two main reasons, for people who want to do interdisciplinary work, choosing from many fields, or for people who want to get very deep into one field – which sounds like what you want to do. This major is only offered in A&S and it is quite competitive to get in.</p>
<p>In general, a third of your classes will be distribution requirements, a third your major, and the last third electives. This all depends on how many AP/IB/GCSE credits you come in with of course. </p>
<p>If I remember right, math and econ classes will get rid of a good chunk of distribution requirements, but plan on taking three or four science or history courses</p>