<p>Hey everyone.
One of the things drawing me to Stanford over Harvard is the quarter system. With only eight classes a year, I feel that H wouldn't give me much time to shop around and figure out what I like.
Has anyone else had similar misgivings before enrolling? How did it work out?
If it's not too difficult/fairly common to take five classes a semester, I would feel less concerned. Is it? How many people do you think do this?
Thanks!</p>
<p>Harvard does not allow you to take more than four classes in your first semester, but after that it is up to you. My daughter is a freshman and is taking five classes this semester without a problem, albeit the fifth class is research. Classes vary in workload, so depending upon what you choose to take, five classes can be doable or difficult. I suspect that you can figure the workload out during the shopping period at the beginning of the semester.</p>
<p>As the above poster said, you can only take 4 in your 1st semester. Some people do take 5 after that, but usually it’s after thought is given to the difficulty of these classes. My friend is taking 5 but one of hers is a freshman seminar, which is graded Pass/Fail. Taking 5 intensive classes is usually an unwise choice.</p>
<p>It’s even possible to take 6, although I think that’s a bad idea in nearly all situations.</p>
<p>Does Stanford have a shopping period? At Harvard, you don’t need to register for classes until the end of the first week, so you spend a few days running around campus like crazy, and getting the chance to sit in on a ton of classes. It’s a great way to get a feel for a bunch of different options, filter out any bad professors, and make sure the workload is doable. Even though I only took 33 classes at Harvard, I felt like I got a taste of far more through shopping them.</p>
<p>(You can also add/drop classes after you register for them, but that’s a bit more of a hassle).</p>
<p>Yes, taking 5 is common, although it’s smart to think about balance when you do this.</p>
<p>You can also use your activities to explore academic interests without enrolling in a class. Eating at your House’s French Table, attending debates at the Institute of Politics, going to the scientific colloquia that happen on campus constantly, etc. are all ways to taste different fields or progress in your interests outside of class time. </p>
<p>You can learn a lot by social osmosis, too. In my experience, if you want to talk to somebody about what they’re reading for class, they’re more than willing. I still remember a conversation I had over lunch with a dorm-mate about her master’s thesis in linguistics – she was writing about the grammatical flexibility of the phrase “mother f*****” in black slang. She is now a professor of linguistics at William & Mary.</p>
<p>Harvard does, there is this thing called shopping week. You check out and attend a bunch of classes your interested in, and at the end of the week select which courses you will do and which you will drop. Also, Harvard doesn’t have any real credit system, you just take 4 classes a semester for 8 semesters.</p>
<p>One of the advantages of the quarter system is that it tends to give you a couple extra chances to try out a class in a field you may not be familiar with to see if you like it (and not just during shopping week – I mean really take it). Is that really important? Hard to tell: Net, it’s probably only one or two classes in your first couple of years, before you have to declare a major, but one of those could be your True Love discipline. On the downside, the quarter system is much more frenzied, precludes any kind of decent reading period before exams, and often means that you cover less in a particular course (whatever the university claims to the contrary).</p>
<p>Are you really going to choose between Harvard and Stanford on such a slim basis? I don’t want to interfere with making up your mind, but of all the reasons to prefer one or the other, quarters vs. semester is pretty indeterminate for either side.</p>
<p>Social osmosis and non-classroom learning opportunities work well at both Stanford and Harvard (although I think Harvard students as a group pay more attention to them and take advantage of them more systematically).</p>