It's been interesting to learn through this board just how different a university experience can be in the many countries all you lovely people come from. With respect to course load, my Canadian experience was much more like puffin's.
I actually checked a few major universities to see if things have changed since my (very long ago) day. Nope. At some, a chemistry major, for instance, needs no courses at all outside their major; others require 1 or even a few humanities/ social sciences, but choice of electives is pretty wide open (i.e. select from among hundreds of courses). I remember taking courses ranging from Shakespeare to structured logic, SciFi and political history myself. No such thing as first year gen ed course requirements here. If you walk in the door as a chemistry major, you pretty much do chemistry-related stuff.
Note that we have quite distinct colleges (applied, shorter certificate programs) vs universities (academic, 4 year degree programs). While there are some major problems with this system, I get the feeling from this board that maybe one advantage is that universities aren't trying to structure their first two years around meeting the very diverse needs of all kinds of post-secondary learners with the same set of classes? I see references here occasionally to "Four-year colleges" - would those have different course loads in early years than colleges that provide both 2 and 4 year degrees?
Here's an example for the insatiably curious, from a U that lays it all nicely out on one page. Interesting that they feel the need to be much more prescriptive with CS majors than chemistry!
http://ugradcalendar.uwaterloo.ca/page/SCI-Honours-Chemistry1http://ugradcalendar.uwaterloo.ca/page/MATH-Bachelor-of-Computer-Science-1
