Strange question, but coming from a hs in which top students sleep 1-6 nightly, not sure if I can sustain that for four more years. Is it possible to sleep 8 hours every night and do ok as a UChicago student?
Yes. 100 percent.
There is something wrong if your high school student is sleeping less than 6 hours on regular basis
My kid says the trick is to sleep during the day as well (funny - that was my trick in college ). Shoot for sufficient sleep within the 24 hour cycle and you should be fine. And then just recognize that some weeks are more intense than others - 7th and 10th week have been particularly busy for my kid these past two quarters.
yeah i sleep a ton
my first class this quarter starts at 11. living the dream!
@kingofcats High school is different from college. In my kid’s high school, which is a stone throw away from the Main Quadrangle, everyone has to be at school by 8:00 am. If there is a history paper due, a Math test, A Spanish quiz, an English presentation, a Music History quiz, PLUS a Biology project to be handed in, then the whole week will be hell for everyone. Sleeping six hours per day is not unusual.
Yet by the time you go to The College, you DON’T have to be at school by 8:00 am. If your first class is at 11:00 am like @HydeSnark , then you have plenty of time to sleep. Of course if you stay up until 5:00 am playing Fortnite, you won’t be getting enough sleep then 
Is it possible? For sure. My first year student sleeps plenty - her first class is at either 10:30 or 11:00, and she gets up 15 minutes before her first class (not a breakfast kid). She does almost all of her paper writing and most of her reading during the day through late afternoon or early evening, sometimes does problem sets or reading at night. If she stays up past 10 p.m. or midnight or 2 a.m. (and she does - a lot), it’s totally because she’s watching movies in the house lounge or hanging with friends or surfing the internet or whatever, not doing school work. She took only 3 courses and did an 18-hour-a-week extracurricular first quarter and did every House activity possible and still had an absurd amount of free time. She took 4 courses and lighter extracurriculars combination second quarter, and overall schedule was definitely fuller, but still plenty of time for fun and sleep. So yes, it’s totally possible.
As everyone says, it depends on what you’re majoring in, what courses you take, how well-prepared you are from your high school classes, how “smart” you are, how perfectionistic/anxious/efficient you are. In her case, she’s planning to major in humanities and social sciences, and doesn’t go out of her way to take hard classes just to take hard classes (she placed out of math core and foreign language, and she is taking non-major science core classes). On the other hand, she doesn’t take easy class just to take easy classes, or look for easy A classes either. She takes the non-major science core classes that interest her as much as possible, she takes one of the harder HUM sequences and plans to take one of the harder SOSC sequences (when they’ll let her into SOSC - %&%#^! - why did they not plan to have enough courses for this large class?!!!). In each of her first 3 quarters, she’s taken / is taking one class that’s almost all 4th years and so far has done great in those. She came in with enough AP credit that she is required to take 4 courses for only 2 out of her 12 quarters at Chicago, and after this quarter, she will have already done those 2 4-course quarters. But, as some have predicted, there are so many interesting classes that she’s now planning to register for 4 courses from now on, with the idea that she could drop one if she ever gets overwhelmed. But I personally think there’s nothing wrong with a kid coming in and planning to take fewer classes if that’s what gets them a balanced life with enough sleep, friend time, extracurricular time, etc. To me, learning is about quality of experience, not primarily quantity. I would say that taking her core HUM, core non-major science, non-core intro class, and one other class with mostly 4th years, she puts in (class, lab, and school work) about 35 to 45 hours a week. More time right at finals time when she has multiple papers and exams (possibly a couple of all nighters that were necessitated solely by procrastination, including procrastination before and after midnight lol). Can everyone choosing any class load at Chicago work only 45 hours a week with a little more around finals? Absolutely not. Can some choosing 4 classes of about average difficulty, based on sincere interest in the classes, do this? Yep.
Thank you for your detailed answers! Very helpful when making life changing decisions.
DD is a second year in a STEM major. This weekend she’s downtown at a Model UN conference (thurs eve-sunday). Next weekend, she wanted to fly out to see us (didn’t see over spring break) and ski. I suggested that maybe being non academically occupied for the first two weekends of a Quarter may be deleterious to her academic progress. She pooh-pooh’ed it and said she can manage. So…it appears there is time to do what one wants to do.
I want to emphasize again that the experience IS different depending on the factors I mentioned above.
We know a very bright kid who attended the most rigorous private school in our area and must have done very well there or he wouldn’t have gotten in to UChicago. This kid was really, really struggling as a second year at UChicago. He was trying to double major in two difficult majors, at least one of which he had little interest in ( < note - that’s really important), and he felt overwhelmed with work. All of the extracurriculars he was trying to do were solely for his resume, not chosen out of genuine previous interest. I think depression and anxiety probably made him less efficient at his school work, and that in turn made him do less well than he expected of himself. He has been advised to work less hard, spend more time finding friends and interesting, low-stress, extracurriculars, and to back off (for now) the major that he is less interested in. I think he is doing better emotionally now, and I don’t think his grades are going down.
He’s certainly not the only one. You can easily find descriptions of pockets of people living very unhealthy lives at UChicago. E.g., https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2017/2/3/shame-healthy/
I was worried, for my daughter’s sake, about the same things you’re worrying about - when she put in her ED application, I was concerned about whether she’d enjoy college, and be able to keep up with the work without sacrificing sleep or other things that I think are crucial to a good life, and to optimal learning, for that matter. In her case, though, as I said, it’s turned out just fine.
I wanted to put in my daughter’s experience to contradict the idea in these articles that everyone at UChicago feels ashamed if they aren’t working all the time and suffering a lot. This is not my daughter’s experience or that of her closest friends.
But it definitely happens.
I’m really not sure that modern-day UChicago is different from other elite universities in this respect.
I went to a top 3 Ivy League university myself, and I nearly killed myself (figuratively) my first year with an insane course schedule, because I was very poorly advised, had a hard-driving personality, and had come from an high schoo where the toughest courses were way too easy for me. By second year, I was in more appropriate classes and got some balance back in my life.
We have friends whose daughter has now twice left Brown because of anxiety.
I get why you’re asking your question. I used to read every CC thread like this carefully, trying to see if UChicago could give my daughter what she wanted out of a college experience. But since people have very different experiences, based on so many factors, I’m not sure threads like this are that useful in the end. Maybe they’re useful, not because they’ll tell you what your experience will be like, but because they’ll let you know that there are at least a range of experiences.
I don’t want to be discouraging, but I suspect that if you’re a person who decides or feels compelled to prioritize other things over sleeping more than 1-6 hours a night (!!!), you might be the kind of person who will end up doing that at UChicago. That’s not a guarantee - if you intentionally seek out people who don’t act like that, pick classes that don’t require such work to pass, and try to overcome perfectionism in your work and regarding your GPA, then maybe you’ll find out you can do fine at UChicago with a much more balanced lifestyle. But it’s not going to be an automatic thing, because there are people there who will tell you must suffer, and some course combinations you could choose at UChicago will certainly not be easier than even the most rigorous high school - far from it. But again, I think this is probably true for all selective schools.
My D, a freshman, has plenty of time to sleep. It’s just that she apparently has far more interesting things to do instead. She probably gets about six hours a night. But she loves the place.