On the note of linguistics - I started a linguistics course at the same semester as a compilers course, and I found them to be a perfect complement to each othe

On the note of linguistics - I started a linguistics course at the same semester as a compilers course, and I found them to be a perfect complement to each other; it was all patterns and parse trees. My non-CS classmates in the linguistics class had a much harder time grasping the concepts, and the professor had to come up with some crazy curve to account for the difference between our levels. So, depending on how you approach computer science, you may find that those same skills have prepared you for linguistics, or vice versa. Either way, I highly recommend learning linguistics; it is a fascinating discipline.