<p>Josh05 - about your original question: there isn’t a typical freshman schedule at Yale, nor at many other colleges. Students design a freshman schedule to achieve a number of diverse (sometimes incompatible) goals –
- to balance workload
- out of interest
- to satisfy pre-reqs for classes they want to take in subsequent semesters, in fields that may end up being their major
- to help clarify whether they want to choose a particular major
- to satisfy breadth requirements
- to make themselves more marketable, or help them acquire useful skills</p>
<p>Students can and regularly do take classes in their freshman year ‘in their major’. A little time spent browsing the online Yale College Catalog will help you see the overall picture better, I think.</p>
<p>Your second issue seems to be the question of whether one can graduate Yale in fewer than 8 semesters by virtue of taking AP classes in high school (and maybe taking 5-6 classes every single semester). The short answer to that is, ‘sort-of, but very very few people who have that choice do it that way’. Almost everyone who matriculates at Yale has taken a lot of AP classes in high school (or gone to high schools so snooty that they don’t even offer APs because their regular classes are regarded as being superior to APs), and done well in them. Your history classes, for example, are not going to be full of people who took regular American History in high schools where APUSH was offered. </p>
<p>Your implied 3rd question seems to be, ‘in that case, why take APs and struggle to do well on them in high school’. Basically, for most applicants, the way to take a ‘most rigorous’ high school courseload is by taking many APs, and that counts for a lot in admissions to Yale and it’s peers.</p>