The only sad thing about the advice to take "core" requirements during your first year and then do your major in your second to fourth years is that it hurts CS

The only sad thing about the advice to take "core" requirements during your first year and then do your major in your second to fourth years is that it hurts CS majors (and presumably others) who then end up forced to take multiple heavy systems courses in a single quarter, usually due to pre-reqs or every-other-year offerings. If you take Operating Systems and Compilers in the same quarter, you're just not going to be able to get as much out of them as you would if you took them during separate quarters. Even if you manage to avoid schedule overload, it still means that you're only just finishing the basic curriculum tree near the end of your senior year. That's too late to start doing independent projects with faculty, which are really the easiest way to both give you a better-looking resume and to find out what the graduate school experience is like. I see this frequently with the students at the UofC, which actively encourages students to do nothing but general distro courses their first year. That said, I'm also a little jealous! By the time I took freshman physics as a senior, I was far too busy with research to care about anything more than a passing grade, and I probably missed out on some fun party tricks.