Cryptography survey as an undergrad Is cryptography so specialized that taking a survey class is a waste of time?
I'm not the type of person who can do logs in my head or has a deep mathematical aptitude, but cryptography is certainly very interesting. But I wonder if I'll scratch the surface and realize quite quickly that there are very few who can participate in the greater conversations.
No, I think a general understanding of what a cipher, hash, signature, MAC and a few other of these concepts will make it much easier to understand what cryptography is about.

It's like some knowledge about cars can be very helpful, even if you don't get to be a mechanic. Especially understanding a bit about certificates and PKI is pretty useful, as it is the underlying authentication structure for the internet (especially TLS and therefore HTTPS).

We may be a bit biased here. You can get by pretty well without knowing cryptography. Then again, you won't need a lot of mathematics unless you presume you're going to build cryptographic algorithms or perform cryptographic analysis.