littlebighead

I'm glad to have helped. I can completely relate to your situation. When I was in college, these requirement classes were incredibly competitive. I pulled so many all-nighters. Professors were unsympathetic and quite proud of creating such hell. The department felt that these weeder classes were a good thing because only those that truly deserved to be CS majors could pass this "rite of passage." But I disagree -- I think it unnecessarily turned off a lot of people. I had one very close friend who was so distraught, he dropped out of school entirely. He later went back to school, but to another school that was not so stressful. He still got a software job in the end, and he's much happier. It might not be what I would suggest, but it worked for him.

Those project courses can be tough, but they can also be rewarding. I would suggest that you find good partners early, before even signing up for classes. You may be afraid of being a deadweight, but it doesn't sound like you are one. It sounds more like you lack some confidence. I've worked with deadweights before. They don't lack confidence, they're just lazy. The only deadweights I would have tolerated were pretty girls, but they don't go into CS.

The good thing about a projects class, though, is that it's a little more like real life in the sense that you work with people cooperatively. But it's still not like real life because, unless you work for an aggressive startup, real work isn't supposed to be that stressful. It's also a good way to practice communication skills, which you may not need, but I know a lot of CS majors who lacked very fundamental social skills.

But you really have to ask yourself -- do you like programming? Never mind the project deadlines and midterms. Do you enjoy thinking about problems and coming up with solutions that involve code? Do you, say, dream about prime number algorithms, or fantasize about coding for Martian rovers? Do you get a kick out of writing beautiful, elegant code that solves a very messy problem? The reason why I ask is because there's no real way around it -- if you don't like programming, CS isn't for you. I think you have to like it.

It's good that you're thinking about what a dream job would be like. What is it about networking that you like? Do you get a kick out of designing network topologies? Or manually coding a router table? Or devising strategies to thwart a DDoS attack?

The great thing about a CS degree is that it does open a lot of doors. It would certainly help you land a networking job, or a programming job. So it's good to know what kind of job you want before you think about staying with or abandoning CS.

Best of luck!