<p>I applied Penn CAS ED and was accepted, and the past few months for me have been spent in eager anticipation and excitement. And now, as the time moving quickly (granted it is still a long way away), I was wondering if anyone could help me to get more of a sense of the courseload for a freshman. I am probably a history/ art history/ political science major with a lot of interest in learning language (french, spanish, italian). I also would like to get my math/science requirement out of the way as quickly as possible. Can anyone give me a sense of what the typical freshman takes first and second semester? 3, 4 or even 5 classes (keeping in mind I would like to have a social life and adjust to the college experience)? </p>
<p>For most non-science majors in CAS, you will probably end up needing to take 4 credit units worth of courses per semester (most classes are 1 CU). Sometime during your first year, you’ll also need to take the required writing seminar.</p>
<p>It is common to take four classes first semester and either four or five classes second semester freshman year. Most College freshmen take a writing seminar, language class, sector requirement and something that interests them (in your case, Art History, History or PSCI). Second semester would be another couple requirement courses, language and one or two classes that could potentially be in a major.</p>
<p>My freshman courses were:</p>
<p>ENGL009 (writing seminar)
PHIL002 (Ethics… counted toward my major but didn’t think about that aspect til junior year)
LATN001 (thought about doing Latin for the language requirement…it was a waste haha)
ECON001 (Intro Microeconomics… counted toward my major)</p>
<p>Second Semester
ASTR001 (Survey of the Universe… fulfilled two requirements)
PSCI110 (Comparative Politics… major course)
ECON002 (Intro Macroeconomics)
MATH114 (Multivariable Calculus… fulfilled Formal Reasoning)
GRMN102 (Elementary German II)</p>
<p>Chrisw is your major Philosophy, Politics and Economics???
That’s the major I want to pursue if I get accepted and it seems like your classes are aimed at the major
If you are in that major how is it? Are there a lot of students in that program?</p>
<p>Funny, I entered under the impression that I was going to do PPE, but then they changed the major requirements, making it less interesting to me. Coincidentally, I started to really love Polisci during my sophomore year, so I just declared PSCI and never looked back.</p>
<p>ECON001 was pretty standard intro microeconomics… tests were a little tough for me, but I pretty well suck at test taking. Found it really difficult to understand Uri Spiegel! ECON002 was designed to be very practical, so it drew on current events. In April, I predicted that given the state of the markets, that the economic situation in the United States was going to get real bad real soon, and in September it did…I wished I had been wrong but still, it was kinda cool to understand the markets that well 2/3 of the way into an introductory macroeconomics course. The professor no longer teaches at Penn.</p>
<p>My ECON001 course was curved. My ECON002 was “not” curved, but it was graded on a scale that was affected by the overall performance of the class. Basically that meant that there was no standard metric for assigning grades.</p>