Double Major and Course Load

Student Lounge College Life
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<p>I plan on double majoring in biology and mathematics. I’ve worked out my 4 year schedule, and it’s very possible for me to graduate in four years with both degrees, so long as I take 17 credit hours every semester. I wouldn’t be surprised if I took some summer courses along the way and had fewer hours. Several questions, though:</p>

<li>Does anyone have experience with double majors? Any info you could give me on what it’s like? </li>
<li>What is a 17 credit courseload like? I know it’ll differ based on my skills/courses/etc., but I’m looking for a general idea. I start my first semester with 17 hours, though 3 are for a gen ed and 4 are honors discussion classes about a book we’re reading over the summer.</li>
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<p>Any info is much appreciated!</p>

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<p>don’t expect to have much of a life with 17 credit hours. </p>

<p>Aim for 15 at most, 12 if you plan on taking more in the summer.</p>

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<p>Part of the issue is that I lose my scholarships if I take less than 15 per semester, not counting any summer courses. There’s only a one credit class this semester that I could drop to keep me over 15 but under 17. Is it worth dropping that one?</p>

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<li><p>It depends on the distribution requirements at your school. Since I had a lot of AP credit, my second major really just replaced some electives.</p></li>
<li><p>I’ve had at least 17 hours for 6/8 semesters. It’s been fine; I’ve only felt overworked when I hit 20 hours. I’m double majoring in the humanities, so I’d read about 800 pages/week and write around 100-120 pages/semester. When I was double majoring in science/language, I actually spent a lot less time on a day-to-day basis studying, but I also had a few more study sessions before exams. You’ll be fine if you budget your time wisely.</p></li>
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<p>Thanks for that advice! My double major will work pretty similarly… I test out of England, foreign language, history, and several math classes with AP credit, so it fits in well with my schedule. I’m guessing it won’t be too different from most people’s schedules, just with different classes…?</p>

<p>Glad to know 17 wasn’t hard. I know bio/math aren’t extremely literature-based, so I won’t have as much reading to weigh me down. And thankfully I never fit 20 – that sounds hard! If you’re still following the topic, mind if I ask how closely you follow that “two-three hours of studying for one hour of class” guideline? I’m trying to get a rough idea of how many people actually fit with that.</p>

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<p>I took 16 credits my first semester and didn’t work. One of the classes was 1 credit and ended halfway through the semester, so it was down to 15. </p>

<p>I had loads of free time.</p>

<p>Second semester I got a job and worked about 20 hours a week, and took 18 credits. I still had plenty of time to get all my work done. </p>

<p>Lowest grade was a B+ in second semester. Rest were A’s and one A+.</p>

<p>I wasn’t really organized, and wasted a lot of time, and didn’t have much of a problem. If you work efficiently, you will have next to no problems at all.</p>

<p>17 really isn’t much. At most schools you need 15 credits on average per a semester to graduate. So that’s only 2 over the minimum.</p>

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<p>Sweeeet. This is really raising my confidence about it, since one professor started criticizing me for taking too many credits, even though it doesn’t seem like it’ll be sucking the life out of me.</p>

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<p>What was your major?</p>

<p>To the OP: good luck! 17 hours of mathematics classes a semester will be a lot of work, unless you are really really smart. College mathematics is a whole new ballgame . . .</p>

<p>actually nvm i can’t read. you are also taking biology classes alongside the math courses. still, having 3 math courses alongside 2-3 other courses will be a ton of work.</p>

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<p>Thanks a ton. :slight_smile: At least I’m not taking more than 2 math courses in any given semester, but I’m pretty good at it, and I definately enjoy math.</p>

<p>I think Akhman is some sort of media major, like film. Or something. I think I remember from a chance thread I saw.</p>

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<p>For my current majors, 3-4 hours is normal. I spent 5 semesters as a bio major (well, my school’s version of biology), and an hour/class plus 2-3 hours/lab was pretty typical for me and my friends. I only had 3 math classes, but I also spent about an hour/class-- I’m sure this would be different with higher-level classes, though. I guess I studied more before exams, so it might have averaged out to more like 1.5 hours/class for bio and math?</p>

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<p>I really hate all of the engineering/math/science snobs, but sometimes they are right. 17 hours of courses in those subjects will require a little more study than other majors. I don’t think you’ll have “loads of free time.”</p>

<p>But I shouldn’t be so negative. Math is a really cool major. You’ll learn a lot of cool stuff.</p>

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<p>Well, this semester I only have one intro science class and one math class, so I should be able to get some idea of how much of a workload it’ll be before I get in too deep. Not having a ton of free time isn’t a huge problem for me, either; I’ve always liked academics, and I’m definately not a partier by any stretch of the imagination.</p>

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<p>Yeah, that sounds reasonable. You’ll be fine. </p>

<p>I’m quick to lecture about those things because I was really overwhelmed my first semester. I rolled into college thinking it would be a cakewalk, and then got burnt.</p>

<p>It sounds like you have the right attitude about the whole thing, though.</p>

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<p>Upper-level math classes (real analysis and up) can potentially consume a lot of time. Not because you have so much stuff to read or write, but because the problem sets take a while to solve. Problems in upper-level math classes are unlike the math problems you have seen in high school. In high school you might have to do 50 exercises a week, but each of them is very straight forward. In college you will rarely have more than 5 problems a week to work on, but each of them might take you several hours to solve.</p>

<p>A lot of it depends on how math is taught at your college. I can bs my way through most math classes at my own college with less than 3 hours of work a week per class. The upper-level math classes I have taken at a neighboring college don’t let me get by that easily. I need to invest somewhere closer to 10 hours of work a week outside of class to stay on top of the material (per class!), and apparently that’s about average there. I have taken some of the allegedly hardest econ and computer science classes at my college and I thought they were refreshingly easy compared to my math classes. They still required a lot of work, but the overall strategy of attack was always clear from the outset. I just needed to divide the work into bite-size pieces and tackle it one bit at a time. In math I will spend most of my time looking for the key insight that will make the proof work. Once I have a plan of attack, filling in the details is trivial but it might take days of false approaches to get there. </p>

<p>Sorry for the novel. All I wanted to say is that you should not underestimate the workload of a math major (and something similar might be true for biology as well). Just because you don’t need to do a lot of reading or writing does not mean that you will not spend a lot of time with school work. I am not intending to discourage you from double-majoring. By all means please do keep your options open if you think that you might want pursue that route, but also keep in mind that your interests might change. And that’s okay. I was initially going to double major in math and econ, then in math and computer science and then I decided that I would rather take more math and forget about CS altogether. I may or may not take two more CS classes to get a minor next year, we will see.</p>

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<p>I’m jealous. I have a single major and I still have to take an average of 16 credits/semester!</p>

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<p>Take Partial Differential Equations (PDE’s) if you get the chance. That is some cool math right there!</p>

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<p>First of all, there’s nothing wrong with taking summer courses, but I wouldn’t advise doing it just so you can take fewer than 17 credits per semester. I don’t know what’s up with everyone in this thread, but 17 is not hard at all. Normal is 16, and 17 isn’t really pushing it at all. In my opinion, you should definitely stick to fewer than 18 in your first semester, and fewer than 20 for your second semester, but that’s it. When I took 16 last fall, I almost felt like I had too much free time, so much that I even slacked off too much on my work. You don’t want 18 or more credits when you’re figuring out how to do well in college, and you don’t want 20 in your second semester because for most of your classes freshman year you’re probably going to have recitations/labs/workshops/etc, which take up annoying amounts of time.</p>

<p>I took 20 credits last semester and was also a TA and it was very difficult. I’d say it was hard for two reasons: a) I had 3 classes in Math, and 2 classes in Computer Science. This fall I’m taking 21, but only 9 of those credits are in math, and either 4 or 0 are in Computer Science, depending on my final schedule. The rest are humanities/social science classes; and b) one of my classes was Data Structures, and it was an annoying freshman-level class… we had lecture, two labs per week, four projects, and a 2 hour workshop every week. IMO, that’s totally excessive for a 4-credit class. That’s 7 hour of class time per week alone, assuming I don’t need any extra time outside of class to finish the labs (which was usually true, but not always), then there’s also the four nights when I’m trying to do the CS projects before the deadline. But exams were no problem, it was an easy class full of freshmen, so the exams were a walk in the park.</p>

<p>As far as time commitment for math vs. reading-heavy classes… in math, you actually have to understand all the reading in the book (unless you wanna BS your way through the class and get a B), whereas in reading-heavy classes you can get by not even doing the reading and still doing pretty well in them.</p>

<p>I guess I’m sort of in the same situation as Barium… when I came in to college I was thinking I’d major in political science (lol), then by the end of my freshman year I thought it’d be Math and Computer Science, and now it’s just Math, although depending on how much more CS I take, I could get a minor in it, or potentially even a 2nd major. I don’t think the homework in upper level math classes is what you need to worry about… the main time commitment is understanding the stuff well enough to do well on the exams. But it’s not really true at all that more than 5 problems per week is a rarity… I’d say average is about 8-15 problems per week, depending on the class. Whenever I have a week with only 4 or 5 problems for a class, it gives me considerably more free time. But you should be fine in math classes, IMO, as long as you do the HW at all, even if you don’t get it all right, then focus on the exams. The couple times I skipped a bunch of homework assignments in math classes and then had to force myself to get basically 100% on the exams were pretty tough. I think spending 3-4 hours per math class (for studying) per week is reasonable… then up it to twice that if you can for exam weeks. For weekly assignments maybe 1-2 hours is generally fine, maybe 3 hours in a particular week if the assignment is especially long has has some especially tricky problems.</p>

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<p>Thanks, guys. Our credits are capped at 19 unless you ask for special permission (never given to freshman, usually only given to seniors who need an extra class to graduate on time), so I don’t think my schedule will ever be quite as crowded as some of the examples you guys are giving. I think I slipped up a little before on my comments about reading vs. non-reading classes; I realize math takes just as much time, if not more, than a reading-intensive major. I just find math to go by faster and not seem so tedious to me.</p>

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<p>I’ll be a freshman in the fall, and am taking 17 credits. At my school, you take 5 classes a semester unless you have special permission to take 4 or 6. I am taking 5, but with labs and discussions my credits go up to 17. I am assuming this is pretty average. So, hopefully, we will both be fine.</p>

<p>(Also, I am a Bio major, possibly interested in a history minor. I am taking 2 science classes, 1 math, and 2 humanities).</p>

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<p>awb1989, math seems to be taught differently at your college. At mine exams are just another homework assignment (unlimited time take-home exams with or without open book or open library privileges), which do not count enough to make up for low homework grades. And the last time I had more than 6 weekly problems for a single class was in multivariable calculus. That was when homework assignments were still primarily computational. Now my homework problems look more like the following:</p>

<p>(Linear Algebra) Show that an endomorphism f: V->V of a finite-dimensional complex vector space is normal, i.e. f<em>(f) = f(f</em>), if and only if V has an orthonormal basis of Eigenvectors of f.</p>

<p>(Real Analysis 1) Show that every nonempty perfect set in n-dimensional Eucildean space is uncountable. (A set S is perfect if for every element p in S there exists a sequence in S-{p} that converges to p.)</p>