<p>Hi all,
I'm applying to USC this fall and I would like to hear about the academic rigor at USC. I attend a competitive public high school (top 50) where numbers are everything and frankly it is a rather disheartening if not poisonous environment. Teachers are not that great either.</p>
<p>I don't particularly want to attend a school where it'll be a repeat of my high school. I don't want to be stuck in my room from afternoon to midnight studying 7 days a week. </p>
<p>While I am not an All-As-Forever-And-Always snob I am disappointed in myself the few times I get Bs. I want to attend a school where the amount of work I put in will give me good results. I have good study habits and am willing to put in the time, but As mentioned before I don't particularly want to have to spend hours and hours in order to get an A.</p>
<p>Thanks for your time!</p>
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<p>Oh, and if it helps any I'm a prospective English major looking to law school for the future. However Id appreciate responses for within my projected major as well as the general academic trends here. Thank you again!</p>
<p>Sigh. Perhaps you might be happier with a lower tier school where you can be at the top of the food chain without putting in a lot of work. If you’re approaching USC will all these preconditions (there is a lot of work but it is manageable) I suspect they won’t find you a good match for them. Remember, they turn down the majority of people who apply.</p>
<p>Could you possibly elaborate on the part that best answers the essence of my question? “There is a lot of work but it is manageable” was the most helpful aspect of your response.</p>
<p>Can you give examples of lower tier schools you suspect I might be “happier” at?</p>
<p>If you will only be happy with A’s, USC along with most top 40 universities will require a lot of work to excel in your major. But it is not like HS work. No busywork assignments, worksheets, vocab tests. No pop quizzes. No month-long projects with graphs and posters that take months with flaky partners who may let you down. But as ArtsandLetters advised, it is manageable. Unlike HS, you are not locked in a classroom 7 hours/day. You’ll have the time to do the reading if you make getting your work done a priority. You will be rewarded for the quality of your thoughts, the inventiveness of your analysis, and the strength of your writing. If you have excellent communication skills and organization, you should do very well. Please remember, no matter what school you attend, gpas at the undergrad college level are not the same as HS either. A gpa of 3.5 is excellent. A gpa of 3.8 will put you at the top 10% of your college class.</p>
<p>Thank you so much for your response madbean. I feel a lot more reassured about the qualities one is rewarded for and have a little better sense of how academics are.
Also thank you for such a straightforward and objective response.</p>
<p>Lower tier is subjective - I mean colleges for which the average admittance rate is high, and the average scores are lower.</p>
<p>I wasn’t meaning to be obscure. We don’t have enough information to judge your situation.</p>
<p>You said:</p>
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<p>What amount of work? A little. A lot? 2 hours a day? 10? It’s not defined in your question other than you currently expect 24-7.</p>
<p>Here’s the deal. Some degree programs within USC are harder than others because their structure and course requirements leave little free time and are filled with extremely competitive students. If you want to study English, there is a lot of reading, research and papers involved for those courses. When you add the significant number of extracurricular and academic opportunities on campus - no, you will not spend 24-7 in your room studying (AT ANY COLLEGE), but you will probably be working harder than you are at high school. Adding the pre-law component will probably up the time commitment factor. </p>
<p>Hence my response, USC is hard - but not impossibly so. But the relative amount of time needed to satisfactorily complete a course is dependent on the individual student and the course selections they make.</p>
<p>If you are working from afternoon to midnight every night in high school, on top of attending school every day, then USC will almost certainly be more relaxed in terms of academics than your high school. The first year or two is generally less work academically, with the main point of those earlier years being you establishing yourself at the school, finding solid extracurriculars, friends, etc. Junior and senior year are usually more demanding academically, so you might work like you do as a senior in high school, but you may enjoy what you are doing more, since most of the classes should be in your major. Depending on which law school you want to attend, some of the 25th to 75th percentile GPA’s are astronomical, which essentially means that you would work as you currently do in your high school for four years, and focus on academics. However, you can certainly learn a lot outside the classroom at a place like USC, and the environment is likely more fun than your high school and less academically competitive, since there are distractions like parties, football games, time-intensive extracurriculars, etc. which ensure that everyone is not focused on academics (as they seem to be at your high school).</p>
<p>A long time ago, a tutor I had suggested that if I went to class at 8 or 9 and worked til 5, Monday thru Friday, I could have my weekends free most weeks. During midterms and for lab reports I could expect to work those weekends, but I should keep to a daylight schedule, nonetheless. Would that I had listened to him when the siren song of Jerry Garcia interrupted my studies. </p>
<p>However, I think that’s still true, even at the reincarnated, more competitive USC and at many other colleges. Treat going to school like a salaried day job that sometimes requires some overtime. Work out in the evenings. Get eight hours of night-time sleep each night, except on those weekends when there’s no work due. Use school breaks to plan your internships and research plans. Read Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography; same natural laws apply today, methinks.</p>
<p>Along the lines of your advice, the best rule of thumb I’ve ever heard for college workload is: spend two-hours per week studying outside of class for every hour of in-class time. So, four classes, meeting 3 hours per week equals 12 hours in-class time. 12 x 2 = 24 (outside study time). 24 + 12 = 36 hours a week of academic effort.</p>
<p>Obviously, you don’t just stop studying after 24 hours if you need to do more work. As well, some classes are going to take up more time than others, and depending on various times during the semester, more (or less) outside of class time may be in order. It’s not perfect I but I’ve seen it work way too often to dismiss.</p>
<p>My kids both went to a very competitive top HS in HI. They both enjoyed their years at USC. S majored in engineering. His room mate (from the East Coast) enjoyed his English major. D majored in cinema. The English major, like the one noted above, read a LOT of books and wrote a LOT of papers, while playing hockey.</p>
<p>If you have good habits and are able to study efficiently and effectively, you can even have a part-time job while attending school and keeping up good grades. Our S got better grades in engineering than he had in HS. Balance is important and they do have coaches to help you improve study habits and organization, as you desire and need.</p>