Students come to CS1 with a wide variety of motivations and goals,
which may differ across subpopulations and be indicative of their
future engagement with CS. While there is a rich literature relating
success in CS1 to specific constructs, such as belonging,
goal-orientation, or self-efficacy, less work has examined what
motivations and goals students volunteer as most important for their
enrollment in CS1. Here, we use qualitative coding to identify themes
from students' open-ended descriptions of why they're taking CS1 and
what they hope to get out of it, collected across fifteen years. Using
quantitative analysis of these coded descriptions, and word-frequency
analysis, we identify and name three clusters of students that
encompass the majority of students taking CS1: Explorers, Planners,
and Utilitarians.  We also identify motivations and goals that are
more common for particular populations, such as students who have not
yet declared a major or students without prior programming experience,
as well as factors predicting students' later engagement with CS. This
work demonstrates the potential of qualitative coding and
computational analyses to enable us to better understand a population
of students based on their own words.