Seriously? "V.D."?!? The 70s called and they want their terminology back.

Also, -1 Grammar for (i) superfluous, and (ii) incorrect use of an archaic 2nd person suffix.

*grumble*

<disgruntled linguist>
Moreover...

(1) "oot and aboot" is NOT what Canadian Raising sounds like (nor "oat in a boat")...the vowel in "oot" is high and back, whereas the vowel in Canadian Raised "out" is (well, technically starts, since it's a diphthong) mid-high and central (like the vowel in "cut")

(2) Most Canadians don't speak that way

(3) A fair chunk of people in the US speak that way

</disgruntled linguist>

You...you're the only person of English descent in your family? How does that work?!?

Non sequitur. I can believe in forcing my moral worldview on other people while it includes such things as an uncompromising commitment to gay marriage and legalization of drugs. Remember people, morals are what you believe is right, not what you believe is Right.

Shades of "Good Will Hunting", here...

My first answer is to echo what a lot of other posters have said, and help her figure out what it is she wants. If she can find something that she can be truly impassioned about, then she'll have a leg up on most other kids starting uni. Of course, she's still pretty young, so she might not know yet what turns her crank.

On the other hand, I've often said that if I could go back to uni and do another undergrad, I'd do math for sure. There are just so many doors that math leaves open, and the kind of thinking the various maths foster is useful.

On the third hand, if you really want a concrete suggestion other than math/science, I'd go with Linguistics or Cognitive Science (but I may be biased ;). Have her check out the NACS program at Maryland, or CogSci at Johns Hopkins, or Linguistics or CogSci at MIT. Or the Symbolic Systems BA at Stanford (possibly the coolest undergrad program in existence). There's a lot of non-mathy (well, some math is involved), non (hard-)sciencey stuff going on that's really interesting out there.

Best of luck to her. She's at an exciting time in her Life. Help her realize that.

There are lots of interesting and relevant threads here (some...not so much). I'm definitely down with GEB as being somehow of relevance to this, and of course the Formal Logic/CS connection should be obvious (and yes, CS/Logic is Math, which is why Waterloo is pretty much the only place I know of that has CS in the right faculty...and no, I didn't go there).

But I think the best answer to this question is Cantwell Smith's book The Origins of Objects . It's explicitly about the epistemological and ontological commitments of computation. What is it we're doing when we "compute"? Is the notion of "computation" definable? (please don't give me half-arsed definitions of algorithms in response). It's quite a read...I've gone back to it a few times now and still haven't made up my mind about it.

In case you don't know who Cantwell Smith is and are the kind of person who likes/wants/needs credentials: he was a co-founder of Stanford's CSLI, a principal scientist at Xerox PARC, and (a short quote from his Wikipedia entry) "Smith is currently based out of the University of Toronto, where he is Dean and Professor at the Faculty of Information. Additionally, Smith holds a Canada Research Chair in the Foundations of Information, and is cross-appointed as Professor in the departments of Philosophy and Computer Science and in the Program in Communication, Culture and Technology at University of Toronto at Mississauga."

Yay Dancehall Crashers! I was introduced to them, of all places, on the Angus soundtrack. Anyway, they're great.