Does UChicago live up to its "extremely hard" reputation?

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
1

How hard is “really, really hard?” Is it true what everyone says about the workload being ridiculous, all work and no play, etc, or are those rumors started to dissuade massive amounts of people from applying?

Basically, so far I’ve been accepted to two colleges with reputations like that (here and Swarthmore). Ultimately, I LOVE both schools, love the intellectual culture surrounding them and the strong academic focus, but now that attending has actually become a reality… it’s a little scary. I’m pretty much wondering whether or not the workload is actually as bad as everyone says it is, and if it would be possible to strategically choose core-required classes to reduce that workload (especially in math and science).

I don’t mind working hard. I like it. But I also don’t want my college years to be exclusively comprised of the class-study-class-study cycle, you know?

2

The administration has taken many steps to improve the undergrad experience, and this is reflected in more relaxed grading policies. While I don’t have statistics, I think the average GPA is now 3.4-3.5. As an economics major, I came to UofC expecting a brutal curve, since I had heard the economics classes were curved to a B- average. In reality, the curve has been better than expect — think a B+ average.

Remember that Chicago is on the quarter system, and often times professors will cram material into one quarter that would fit into a semester at other schools — this is the big reason why classes feel rushed. Relatively speaking, I think Chicago is on par with the more rigorous Ivies such as Princeton and Columbia.

Also, Hyde Park is pretty boring, so you might not have many other things to do besides study. You can definitely choose easy core classes — there are quite a few of them. But if you want to breeze by your college years, this is not the place to be.

3

I don’t think so.

What are your strength and weakness? If you are good at math and physical sciences then those courses should not be too hard to you. If you are good at reading and writing then hum and sosc should be OK. You will be struggling on some your weak courses sometimes but you can definitely make it.

Yes you can strategically choose core courses to fit your need. Chicago’s core is not fixed. It consists of categories which consist of differnt courses. Beware of the quarter system which is very fast paced. I think most students do have time to enjoy the college life but take academics seriously.

4

Good to hear about the relaxed grading curves! And the quarter system definitely appeals to me. I think I personally work better taking fewer classes at a faster rate than vice versa, where at least all my energy can be focused onto a few things.

I’m definitely not trying to breeze through, but I know what my limits are, haha. Definitely weak in math and science. Massive reading workloads, though, I can handle.

Would you say that you/“most people” at UChicago spend most of your free time studying, though? Like, even if Hyde Park is boring there’s still the rest of Chicago close by. It can’t possibly be boring enough to make you stay in and study instead.

5

UChicago is what you make it. Since Core requirements are more demanding, the “lowest difficulty” is probably a peg higher than that of schools with less restrictive general reqs like the non-Columbia Ivy Leagues. That being said, if you’re someone the University of Chicago appeals to, most of the Core classes should be rather easy-going and enjoyable.

In my experience, the problem at UChicago is the same problem that other elite schools have, but to a greater extent. Put a bunch of academic all-stars in the same room and they’re going to naturally over-perform and over-study. Everyone at UChicago graduated at the top of their class - nobody wants to be at the bottom. There’s a reason that Harvard admits a lot of non-academic types, namely to improve campus culture and make it an appealing place for the sons and daughters of senators and billionaires who don’t want to fight teeth-and-nail with the most intellectual students in the country. (Noticed that Chicago has higher SATs than Harvard? Now you know why.)

You could come to UChicago and take it easy, find a nice, fun group of kids to hang out with, take a bunch of stimulating but not overly hardcore classes, have a blast downtown every weekend, and still walk out with a 3.5. The reason that most students don’t take this path is more due to internal motivation (positive or negative, depending on your viewpoint) than anything.

6

I’m speaking as a somewhat superannuated alumnus… I do remember well the unrelenting pressures of the quarter system as it existed in my time and doubtless does still today. Not to mention the self-imposed pressures referred to by phuriku and the general sturm und drang of life in a big city at a very serious university. Those pressures are real and they’re not for a young person who isn’t also a serious student interested in making discoveries about self and world. For me and my friends that intensity was the essential appeal of the university. The academic requirements in themselves shouldn’t prevent you from pursuing any of the many other activities available on campus or off. During my time at the university I worked part-time jobs, participated in politics, played on the baseball team, and (my own special mania) attended as many lectures and readings by distinguished visiting scholars and writers as I could. Probably most important of all was the making of friendships, romantic and otherwise, and hanging out with those friends, some of whom I still keep up with many years later. But the academic part at a place like Chicago is the crucial part. And it’s not just a matter of swatting things up for grades. Study should be something inherently satisfying to you in itself. If it is, Chicago’s wonderful teachers and the stimulation of other students will take it all to a different level. There’s no denying that at a place like Chicago the business of study and thought will always be front and center. But the odd thing about this (and it’s something we should keep secret from unbelievers!) is just how stimulating and even erotic the experience can be. I promise you, you will feel bracingly alive during your years at the university, and you will remember that feeling as long as you live.

7

Thanks for the answers, all of you! Like I said, I’m not quite so worried about breezing through and partying every weekend, etc. but I do want to have time for extracurriculars, internships, and hanging out, and just wanted to know if it was viable to do those things with the UChicago workload. From what I’m hearing, it’s absolutely possible. So thanks again for all the responses!

8

What other posters have said is consistent with what I have observed.

My D is (seems) always busy when I talk to her. But she does not necessarily spend all her non-class time on course related work. E.g., she spends ~20 hours per week for her varsity sport and ~10 hours per week for other extracurricular activities. Her GPA is above average so far. I think you should be able to make it too.

You are one of the few people who really like the quarter system LOL.

9

Echoing what others have said.

You can make it as hard as you want as there is no upper bound to level of difficulty. There’s always grad classes and research opportunities to continue to challenge you. In my first and second years, I went with the approach of taking the most challenging courses I could (from honors math and physics courses to humanities with some of the stricter and more difficult professors).

However, when I realized I didn’t want to pursue a PhD in math and started taking some of the ‘regular’ level classes, I went from spending ~70 hrs/week on coursework down to ~20 (half of this was because my math classes were a breeze as I had already learned a good portion of the material from previous classes and the other half was because I stopped stressing about grades and was fine with a C+/B- every once in a while).

Another big piece was realizing I didn’t need to take 4 courses each quarter. The difference between 3 and 4 classes is extreme.

Outside of class, in my first two years, I spent 15-25 hrs/week on extra-curricular activities. After I toned down the course work, I spent 60-80 hours/week doing extra-curricular stuff and had a blast.

All-in-all, it’s what you make it which depends on what you care about.

10

-CS: If you don’t mind, what was your degree and what are you doing now?

11

Going to Chicago is a bit like joining a cult, and one that has its own unique culture. College alumni separated by decades can make (mostly dumb) Kant, Durkheim, or Foucault jokes that other alums (and current students) will understand. Part of the culture is working hard. That’s probably due in part to Chicago’s image as a more “theoretical” place, something that was amplified by the high ratio of graduates to undergraduates on campus (although the College has roughly doubled in size in the last 30 years). So, too, it may be that Chicago students are driven to work more vigorously by the spur of rejection from HYPS, although Chicago students, on average, are probably more talented. More famous peers tend to get the very best students academically, but other considerations (wealth and fame legacies; athletics; various types of diversity–income, geography,etc.) also drive a big chunk of peer institutions’ classes. While Chicago’s admissions office would probably want most of the kids who end up at HYPS, Chicago seems to value straight academic ability more highly as a general matter (recognizing that grades/test scores are an imperfect measure of ability). Those kids probably tended to work harder in school before college, and the Chicago environment helps amplify that tendency once they get to Hyde Park.

Choosing Chicago requires something of a “happy warrior” approach to rigorous work. Most students want to do the work, do it well, have time for fun, and eventually become very loyal alumni who couldn’t imagine having gone to college anywhere else.

12

My son has been admitted to Chicago and he’s thrilled. The culture, the core, the students all seem right to him and for him. High school has been a bit too easy and I’ve said that it will be very, very different if he goes to Chicago. I think he’s looking forward to that and he can probably handle the work but I’d like to know that there are resouces–tutoring, accessible professors to help if things get rough. Can anyone comment?

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@zzzmmm‌ There are tons of resources. In the HUM and SOSC classes, professors were very accessible — they have weekly office hours, and I usually sat down with each professor 3-4 times per quarter for one-on-one feedback. One of my professors even spent time outside of office hours to revise an entire essay draft. As a non-humanities major, I was pretty surprised to receive this much attention. Granted, not everyone takes advantage of this accessibility, so your experience varies depending on how much you put in, obviously…

It’s more difficult to say once you start taking major-related classes, since some professors are more accessible and others aren’t, and you may end up interacting more with grad student TA’s, who can be hit-or-miss depending on several factors (e.g. language barrier). For one of my Economics classes, I had two TA’s who were phenomenal and collectively held about five extra hours of review per week, double the 2.5 hours that I spent sitting in lecture.

Finally, there’s something called the “Harper Tutors” program, which are grad students who hold “office hours” and tutor undergrads, no appointment needed: https://core-tutors.uchicago.edu

14

The College once had a (partially justified) reputation as a “sink-or-swim” kind of place, in which College students were exposed to great professors and small classes, but basically had to figure things out for themselves. That’s changed considerably under Dean Boyer’s leadership, which has done much to improve the undergraduate experience outside the classroom–housing, facilities, and support tools are all much stronger now. The link below is a gateway to many of the academic resources on offer.

https://college.uchicago.edu/advising

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Don’t worry, you’ll learn to manage your time wisely very quickly and there will be time for everything… From the practical side of life every quarter you take one less class (and you can do that 6 times over 4 years) you are throwing away about $3500. Think about it: You are going from 35 hours a week of class in high school to about 15 hours of class per week in college. What you do with that extra time is key.

16

While it is true that elite colleges have far more in common than this website and guidebooks would want you to believe, it is also true that the modal UChicago collegiate experience is a substantively different one than that found at Penn, Duke, Yale, Hopkins and a few other facially similar institutions. It is mostly structural in my view, and far less cultural than the “life of the mind” and “where fun comes to die” monikers make it out to be. I lay out the structural case below, since saying Chicago is very academically challenging because a good proportion of the students are more intellectually inclined than their selective college peers only does partial justice to what makes the place unique:

  1. The quarter system. First, professors are strong armed to offer at least two major assessments before the required final. That means that over the course of a ten to eleven week quarter you spend three weeks or so in a live-in-the-library, quasi all nighter study mode to get competitive marks.

Also as a function of the quarter system, exams are not preceded by any type of meaningful study period. It is not uncommon to have a final class session on a Friday be dedicated to review and discussion of potential exam topics, and in turn have the actual evaluation on a Monday. In contrast, in a semester system it is the norm to get an entire week in advance of finals with no courses.

There is also a pedagogical element: textbooks, domains of knowledge / competency, professors’ expectations from their own time as students are anchored to the semester system, which means you will hit plenty of single quarter syllabi that are semester classes in disguise.

  1. As offshoot of the quarter system is the three vs. four class enrollment issue. Assuming you don’t voluntarily max out with four courses each term to fulfill ambitions of a double major, proceed to graduate school early, get your intellectual fill, etc. then by the rules you need to take three courses half the time and four for the remainder. Admittedly, some students are very good at optimizing (e.g., pairing a honors math course with two soft classes), but usually the best laid plans go to hell and you end up taking what you need to take in a given quarter to get from point X to point Y as the registrar has not made it amendable to do otherwise.

My general take was that four courses felt like a recurring marathon past the core (especially if one or more classes was a graduate course), while taking three never really resulted in materially better performance and only really changed the number of days each week where you had to wake up at 8:00 to trudge through the snow to class.

  1. Curved grading vs. objective grading. Chicago, along with about half of the other selective colleges in the US, follows a distribution based grading approach. In any course, not all students can make an ‘A.’ If everyone genuinely does well throughout the term, grades will be spread between an A to a C+ with a peak around a B+/B (core courses are more likely to be a A-/B+). While I never found this to create much competition between students, it does create a certain amount of internal struggling by students with themselves. Few want to be the person consistently at the bottom of the pack gradewise, with the implications that would have for graduate admissions, employment options, etc.

It also means that about half the student body (rough justice) is composed of very dedicated students, since the grades (and ultimately intellectual achievement) you make in a given course is a function of the time you put in both outright and relative to your peers. I repeat: the only limit to how hard you can work is yourself. All the being said, the vast majority of graduate programs and selective employers take up Chicago graduates in good numbers, suggesting that the benefits in terms of perceived / actual rigor the grading scheme imparts outweighs any deleterious, longer term career outcomes. Side note: the case against curved grading is that all selective colleges are treated equal at the end of the day, and hence those schools that hand out A’s like Halloween candy will have better employment and graduate school outcomes.

Back on point, for a subset of students who are used to being at the top of the heap in high school, a slew of B’s can sting and weigh on morale even if it means you could very well end up graduating with honors. Unfortunately, I do believe students / parents are really in a position to know how they will take emotionally to the challenge that rigorous college grading presents until the first report card comes due.

  1. The focus on graduate school not so quietly pervades the College. Chicago – along with Caltech, MIT and Hopkins – is one of a few schools where roughly 75% of students go to graduate studies within five years of receiving their undergraduate degree. The immediate consequence is there are fewer students floating aimlessly through courses, and far more who have some type of (often ever changing but nonetheless perceived) intellectual journey that they are on. This raises the commitment of students to mastering domains of knowledge and grappling with hard questions appreciably in my view (particularly within their majors). It is in the DNA of the institution, and very much impacts how professors teach undergraduates (both in terms of course content and assessment standards).

  2. Many upper division undergraduate courses are actually cross listed graduate courses. This is most common in the social sciences and humanities, but also holds in selected STEM majors (e.g., statistics). Simply put, these courses are harder than your stock college junior / senior classes since the professor builds the course with an eye to the MA / MS / PhD students and lets UG’s along the for the ride. One also has to consider that graduate students at Chicago are generally very strong, in many disciplines stronger than the undergraduates.

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  1. The composition of the student body is different from the outset.

UChicago is a DIII college where sports are principally an activity for team members (and a few roommates or house members who might be willing to throw some moral support their way during a home game). Moreover, Chicago is not particularly notable for any particular sport (even if some teams have won plenty of divisional titles), hence the admissions office is not willing to trade scarce admissions spots for sought after athletes. The emphasis remains on the scholar-athlete, with stressing the former, rather than athletes than are incidentally students as is the case at some institutions due to their competitive DI status (Harvard, Stanford, Duke), or DIII schools that take winning at sports seriously (Hopkins).

Chicago also does not have any legacy admissions tradition money aside. If your father and his father attended Chicago, this does not inherently matter for much, unless they gave inordinate sums of money (and we are talking in the funded a named building range of cash). Admittedly, this tradition is dying fast at most schools, but coming from the right family has not mattered at Chicago since the 50’s. And unlike HYP, LSE or Oxbridge, the college does not appear to go out of its way to attract the children of high flying (albeit not inordinately rich adults). While the modal student is from a dual earner, solidly upper middle class family, it is not like a third of the class are the children of corporate law partners, investment bank managing directors, tech moguls, etc. There are definitely schools in the US that are of the view that students from these types of families are better positioned to thrive after college because of the financial and other soft resources at their sails, and load up on them in their classes. Chicago on net retains a greater degree of socioeconomic diversity.

Finally, for many of the reasons highlighted throughout this post, Chicago has been historically unpopular with students from nationally elite boarding / preparatory schools, and only in recent years received an uptick of interest as it bubbled to the very top of the US News rankings. While graduates of Exeter, Taft and so on tend to do better than average performancewise during their time in the College (as they do elsewhere), these same students often carry with them a preprofessional disposition / definition of success that dampens the intellectual environment. Quite notably, there are too few at Chicago to form a discernible prep school clique lasting beyond the first year, which in contrast thrives at places like Yale and Princeton.

  • Poster attended Chicago and studied at four other selective institutions.
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“There’s a reason that Harvard admits a lot of non-academic types, namely to improve campus culture and make it an appealing place for the sons and daughters of senators and billionaires who don’t want to fight teeth-and-nail with the most intellectual students in the country. (Noticed that Chicago has higher SATs than Harvard? Now you know why.)”

I think the sons and daughter of senators and billionaires are the non-academic types.

19

The sons and daughters of billionaires don’t have to fight anybody tooth-and-nail, and they know it. In my experience, they are quite happy to develop a network consisting of the most brilliant classmates they can find, since they instinctively understand that no one stays on top without a lot of first-class help. Senators’ kids are a similar story. They tend not to be children of billionaires, although most of them are children of very rich people who are also very powerful. They feel a fair amount of pressure to succeed in their own right, and they also know that having really smart friends can help.

Think, for example, of Bill Gates, who was not the child of a billionaire or a senator, but who was a member of a very rich, very powerful family, and who certainly had plenty of smarts himself. His sensational career owed quite a bit to people he befriended in school, chiefly his high school friend Paul Allen and his college friend Steve Ballmer.

20

I’m picking out quotes I agree/don’t agree with and giving comments.

“You could come to UChicago and take it easy, find a nice, fun group of kids to hang out with, take a bunch of stimulating but not overly hardcore classes, have a blast downtown every weekend, and still walk out with a 3.5. The reason that most students don’t take this path is more due to internal motivation (positive or negative, depending on your viewpoint) than anything.” Probably less than a 3.5 I would say, you do have to put in effort, and more effort than other schools, to arrive at this GPA. I have been told by my adviser that my 3.6 is really good and an accomplishment, and my career adviser said I should definitely put it on my resume because it is impressive.

“Remember that Chicago is on the quarter system, and often times professors will cram material into one quarter that would fit into a semester at other schools — this is the big reason why classes feel rushed. Relatively speaking, I think Chicago is on par with the more rigorous Ivies such as Princeton and Columbia.”

This is very true, content goes very fast, sometimes I think we do more work in a quarter than my high school friends at University of California schools do in a year - Like reading 200 page books in a week or two per class. Also, UChicago has quarters, and a 2 day reading period. Princeton has semesters and an 8 day reading period. We take 3 finals a year, and a total of 6 reading period days, Princeton has 2 finals a year, and 14-16 days of reading period. So take that as you will.

“Study should be something inherently satisfying to you in itself. If it is, Chicago’s wonderful teachers and the stimulation of other students will take it all to a different level.” This is SO true, you have to like to do work, all the time, there is no end.

“Another big piece was realizing I didn’t need to take 4 courses each quarter. The difference between 3 and 4 classes is extreme.” This is also very true. Took 4 for my first two years = hell. Take 3 my third year = easy.

“1) The quarter system. First, professors are strong armed to offer at least two major assessments before the required final. That means that over the course of a ten to eleven week quarter you spend three weeks or so in a live-in-the-library, quasi all nighter study mode to get competitive marks.” HAHAHA THIS SUCKS

“There is also a pedagogical element: textbooks, domains of knowledge / competency, professors’ expectations from their own time as students are anchored to the semester system, which means you will hit plenty of single quarter syllabi that are semester classes in disguise.” HAHAHA ALSO THIS

" hence those schools that hand out A’s like Halloween candy will have better employment and graduate school outcomes." Which means all the work may not be worth it!

My comments, no other school I know have has all these factors: the bad winter, quarter system, short reading period, lots of “hard” core requirements, intellectual nature, by-default “competition” because peers are all really good, obsession with academics, lack of good social scene in general, emphasis on original thought/discovery/original sources, high level of writing/reading based courses in the core in which writing TA’s are told by the administration to "grade one grade lower than original planned on assignments (literally my TA told me they tell them to do this).