[am3101]

I went to Princeton and actually found the "COS" department was excellent at introductory programming. A lot of people took COS 126 (the introductory class—equivalent of AP Computer Science) with no programming background and did fine. There was also a COS 109 class that was way easier that _Brian Kernighan_ (of K&R) taught that was explicitly targeted at humanities majors. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall21/cos109/ . I think classes beyond COS 126 were _not_ like this and similar to what you describe re: meaningful hours outside of class, but if you are just exploring, 126 probably scratched your itch.

I had a very similar impression of non-COS STEM classes while I was at Princeton, however... both course descriptions and other students pretty strongly discouraged me from exploring STEM classes.