I was in an informal study group for Knowledge Based AI and one of the brightest students was a journalist. She had no undergrad CS background. She obviously had a hard time on the programming assignments but she started early, asked TA's for help, developed a clear plan. Her agents performed very well. Another student I know is a medical doctor at Kaiser.
I did not have an undergraduate degree in CS when I did my masters (not this program), I used her approach as well. I did numerous online classes, did community college courses etc. and shoulder watched classmates programming and asked lots of questions. It was not easy, but glad I did it !!!!.
