Programs Importance of CS courses to math majors

[skhan172]

Hi all, I'm a honors math student in my second semester right now. I was just wondering how important it is to take programming/CS courses as an undergrad if you are majoring in pure math. I took an introductory java programming course last semester and really enjoyed it and did extremely well. I took the follow-up course and its been less than two weeks and I already feel like this course is beyond me. I was thinking of dropping this course since (a) I have some rather challenging courses this semester including introductory analysis and physics, etc., (b) I am worried this class will kill my GPA and my confidence and (c) The CS course is purely an elective. I was planning to do a minor in CS since I got the impression it made math majors more employable. Now, I'm not so sure about the minor. So, really how important are CS courses for my future if
1.) I decide to go to grad school; or
2.) I decide to become a statistician or some sort of applied mathematician.
While we are at it, can someone please give me good advice on what sort of jobs a pure math major can expect to obtain in the US/Canada(apart from going to grad school, that is). I'm really confused about whether to switch into something like statistics just because the job prospects look better.

 

[kylem]

Can you give us a course description for the course you are taking now?

 

[skhan172]

Here's the official course description:
Object-oriented programming. Abstraction principles: information hiding and encapsulation. Linked lists, stacks, queues, binary search trees. Iterative and recursive processing of data structures. Virtual machines.

Also, I actually did some OOP in the previous course.