<p>Okay, I’m still applying early after looking over this. I do have a passion for comp sci…I do a LOT of programming on my own, I’ve made everything from Sudoku generators and solvers, to a clone of tetris entirely using Java’s swing library. I’m not too worried about quality of practical education because for the most part I can teach myself that, there are loads and loads and loads of resources online and once you got one language down you can just play around with it and do projects on your own, and picking up another language is pretty easy too (I went from Java [and by extension C#, they’re practically the same language!] → Python → C/C++ and most recently Haskell without much trouble). However, as much as I love making things, the theory behind why it works is even more fascinating (as I said, I learned Haskell to learn more about this), so in that respect UChicago sounds perfect.</p>
<p>But, I also adore history and the humanities and want somewhere that has, for some examples, strong linguistics and history departments. Unfortunately that has somewhat limited my college choices because I’ve avoided looking at places like CMU or Caltech that, while good at my intended major, just aren’t as strong at other things I’m interested at.</p>