<p>Not entirely sure if this is how I should do this, but as someone who applied to a good fifteen colleges and eventually decided on Wellesley, I'd like to ease some highly stressed-out applicant minds.</p>
<p>^heysnow white, that’s so sweet of you! My D is so stressed out right now that she can’t even type. She’s applying to 14 schools and WEC is one of her top choices, so she sounds similar to you.</p>
<p>I’m playing secretary. Here’s her questions - </p>
<ol>
<li> “Do they really kill you the first year with the huge workload?”</li>
<li> “Did you interview, and how did it go?” (she did recently)</li>
<li> “Did you apply RD?” (I would assume so, from your description)</li>
</ol>
<p>Again, very nice of you!!</p>
<p>same here! what should you expect form an interview? and how was the adjustment from high school workloads to wellesley’s?</p>
<p>Hi!</p>
<p>I’m also a first-year and found these threads really helpful, so I’d like to jump in and offer responses too if that’s alright. I’m sure having multiple opinions can only be useful!</p>
<p>@vegasmom23
- No! My workload is a lot lighter than it was in high school (for what it matters, my high school is one of the most rigorous public schools in the country). I find myself having tons of free time here, which is something that pretty much NEVER happened in high school.
- I did not interview.
- Yep! I also didn’t expect to get in so that was a pleasant surprise.</p>
<p>@Walahoo
sorry I can’t answer the first question, but I hope I answered the second one sufficiently in my other response! but here’s it again- it was a super easy transition. I have maybe an hour or two of work here and that’s with a ton of procrastination.</p>
<p>Katzly - might help if you share your courses - that sounds incredibly light on out-of-class-work time. My D is a second-year and has adjusted, but her first semester was heavy with both Chem and Bio (with their labs), Calc II and a heavy reading humanities class. I’m here to tell you, her out of class study time was no where close to only 2 hours a day.</p>
<p>For any prospies, it is doable, but I wouldn’t guess Katzly’s experience is very common.</p>
<p>My daughter also has a lot of work, but she also has more free time in which to do it than she ever had in high school. (She took 4 APs–calc, Euro hist, bio, and Eng. lit–her senior year.) Her courses at W are astronomy (plus lab, at night, of course), German, history seminar and drawing. She’s also in choir and is taking piano, which requires a minimum of 6 hours of practice per week (had to sign a contract, so they’re serious!). The drawing class is also a lot of hours of work, which surprised her a little.</p>
<p>D also applied RD, but did the interview before she was even sure she would apply and said that it was like having a fun conversation with a friend. They discussed politics, religion, and basic college interview stuff.</p>
<p>Vegasmom, if your D is used to a heavy course load in HS, she will be prepared for work at any college. With the exception of math, the APs give a lot of unnecessary homework (IMO), whereas the college courses usually only give meaningful work.</p>
<p>I am not speaking to being prepared to handle the work - they wouldn’t let you in if you weren’t (they can tell by your scores and HS profile), but having only a couple hours of work/day is not a common experience from all the reports I get.</p>
<p>No, it isn’t common to have only a few hours of work each day. My daughter says that everyone she knows works very hard. But I do think that if you’re only in classes a few hours a day (compared to 6 or 7 hours per day in HS), then you do wind up with more time to do your work, as well as the extra stuff like working out or attending a lecture.</p>
<p>Good idea maidenMom, that didn’t even occur to me.</p>
<p>I’m currently taking Calc II, Bio (w/ lab), Neuro (w/practicum), and a 200-level Spanish class.</p>
<p>To provide a comparison, my senior year courseload was AP Art History, AP Bio, AP Calc, AP Comp Sci, a philosophy class, and I cannot for the life of me remember if I had another course or what it was (but again, my school is known for being notoriously difficult).</p>
<p>Hope that helps!</p>
<p>How does the grading policy work? I heard that the mean has to be 3.333. Will that hurt students who wants to go to med or law school that needs a good GPA?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>See the thread below - there is some discussion of this topic.</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/wellesley-college/1560955-academic-rigor-wellesley.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/wellesley-college/1560955-academic-rigor-wellesley.html</a></p>