My European based science education lies some years back by now. Those days it was expected to get to grips with Fortran somehow with no compulsory courses offered. Later in the career we had to administrate the computing environment as well. I can't imagine that a scientist can be successful without sound programming skills. I think a start with C is preferable since it is very versatile and base of many Unix/Linux programs. Furthermore C++ as well as scripting languages like Perl, shell scripting are desirable.
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My European based science education lies some years back by now. Those days it was expected to get to grips with Fortran somehow with no compulsory courses offered. Later in the career we had to administrate the computing environment as well. I can't imagine that a scientist can be successful without sound programming skills. I think a start with C is preferable since it is very versatile and base of many Unix/Linux programs. Furthermore C++ as well as scripting languages like Perl, shell scripting are desirable.