<p>Anyone else nervous or willing to assuage my doubts about being able to handle the core curriculum. It is very hard for me to concentrate on reading, I like reading when I have time to concentrate, but when I am rushing it is very hard for me to focus. I have something called LLI which basically doesn't help my reading concentration especially on difficult texts like I am assuming there are for the core curriculum. Has anyone else worried about this going in, but been able to handle all the reading?</p>
<p>I’m kind of worried too. I’m going to try to read like a maniac for the end of this year and the summer so I can practice reading for hours at a time. And I hope to learn how to speed read. </p>
<p>(Disclaimer: I’m a SEAS student so I only had to take one of the three core curriculum tracks.) First, I’d recommend you take a look at the books typically covered in the Core; for example, Literature Humanities, the freshman core class, lists the following books: <a href=“http://www.college.columbia.edu/core/lithum/texts”>http://www.college.columbia.edu/core/lithum/texts</a>. Yes, the texts are long and difficult, and if you foresee trouble further down the road with keeping up with the reading (which is very heavy), definitely start sooner rather than later. However, if it’s crunch time during the semester and there’s no time to read, remember that it isn’t 100% necessary to read every single book from cover to cover. It is of course beneficial, but not many students actually complete their reading for every single book in every single text, and I know of some who have done well even without completing a large portion of the reading. Keep that in mind and good luck!</p>
<p>In my experience basically no one did all the reading. I know plenty of people myself included who did not do the majority of the reading. First of all how rigorous you have to read depends on your professor. Some like to give quizzes on top of lengthy student-ran discussions, while others literally just talk for 2 hours straight every class and don’t care. You can shop around.</p>
<p>I would say generally your grades from Lithum/CC come from your ability to closely analyze a few texts rather than know every single one thoroughly as much of your grade comes from essays (on 1 or 2 books) and the final has large writing portions also focused on depth rather than breadth. </p>
<p>Honestly from my experience the core will not be the hardest classes you take (after all they’re intro to an extent). For liberal arts/writing/discussion heavy classes most importantly you just need to worry about not having some jerk teacher that refuses to give anyone over a B-, which is rare but does happen from time to time as these classes aren’t on curves. </p>