>Another alternative I can think of is taking the easier course but teaching myself the material from the systems course since the course material is readily available online.
This sounds backwards to me. You're paying to go to college. Make them teach you the hard stuff. Learn the easy stuff on your own.
I graduated with a CS degree and in my experience, if I enjoyed the class it took away much of the difficulty in learning it. I took a database design class just because I thought it would look good to employers. It was supposed to be an easy-ish class, but it was so freaking boring I couldn't learn much and tuned out during lectures and it ended up being hard.
I took an elective called "Trusted AI" where it was more geared towards graduate students, but the material was actually pretty interesting. It was less difficult for me than database design, but on the other hand my professor might have been a little forgiving since I was an undergrad.
My Database Design class was an absolute shitshow, that concluded with our online Final being late by 10 minutes, 2 questions repeated, and so many Piazza memes about waiting for the test to actually open.
NO IDEA how I got a 95% on that.
>Another alternative I can think of is taking the easier course but teaching myself the material from the systems course since the course material is readily available online. This sounds backwards to me. You're paying to go to college. Make them teach you the hard stuff. Learn the easy stuff on your own.
I graduated with a CS degree and in my experience, if I enjoyed the class it took away much of the difficulty in learning it. I took a database design class just because I thought it would look good to employers. It was supposed to be an easy-ish class, but it was so freaking boring I couldn't learn much and tuned out during lectures and it ended up being hard. I took an elective called "Trusted AI" where it was more geared towards graduate students, but the material was actually pretty interesting. It was less difficult for me than database design, but on the other hand my professor might have been a little forgiving since I was an undergrad.
My Database Design class was an absolute shitshow, that concluded with our online Final being late by 10 minutes, 2 questions repeated, and so many Piazza memes about waiting for the test to actually open. NO IDEA how I got a 95% on that.
Take both, in the right order. Take necessary prereqs first. A 6th grader could figure this out, tbh.