<p>Can any Econ majors or members of the MS&E program(preferably sophs or above) give me an idea of what a typical day is like? How many hours in class? How many hours spent doing work outside of class during the week? How many hours spent doing work on weekends? Any other general info would be much appreciated. Also, which major would be more practical for a career in the business world and is MS&E harder/easier to get into than the Economics program?</p>
<p>I'm an Economics major.</p>
<p>First off, neither is more difficult to get into than the other. They are both majors (MS&E is not a program at the undergraduate level). The only 'requirement' I know about for Econ is that you get a B or above in Econ 50, but that's really not too difficult (if it is, you shouldn't be an Econ major). </p>
<p>All Econ classes are 5 units, and all (with maybe 1 or 2 exceptions) are 2-hour classes that meet twice a week, with one 50 minute section once a week which is generally, but not always, on Friday. The lectures can be a little tough to sit through, but more and more profs. seem to be offering a 5-10 minutes break in the middle to help fend off boredom and keep you paying attention. There are two really nice things about this way of structuring classes. 1, you avoid the situation a lot of other majors but people in where they'll be taking a class for 3-units, but it will really be a full 5-units worth of work. That leads to situations where you're not getting a whole lot of units of credit but you're still doing a lot of work. Those quarters suck, and avoiding them will make you a happier student. 2, something I view as a good thing but you may or may not like, is that your schedule tends to be a lot freer this way. Sometimes to the point where you'll have two days a week with no class, maybe even three.</p>
<p>Let me go into that in more detail. When I was taking the "econ core" classes, which are the intro courses that are the prereqs for all the upper division classes, I usually had 2 classes on either of Mon/Wed or Tu/Th and 1 class the other of the days. Maybe a section Wed or Th afternoon, a couple Friday afternoon and that was it. After I got into the upper division courses, sections were less likely to be strictly on Friday and were more likely to be any day of the week. As a result, I can't remember the last time I had class on a Friday. This quarter, I only have class on Mon and Wed. As you can see, I'm a big fan of the flexibility the Econ major offers.</p>
<p>The Econ major is also on the smaller side in terms of total units required for the major. It's fairly easy to get another major/minor, if that's something you're interested in.</p>
<p>How much time you spend on work is really a crapshoot. I wish I could give you a comparison to high school, but I'm too far removed and have become accustomed to a college level workload. I'll say this though. There are times where you'll be busting your ass to get stuff done. Most Econ classes are test based, so around midterms time and finals time you'll be pretty busy. In the interim all you'll be likely to have is a weekly problem set, which may or may not be graded depending on the class. That tends to translate into a week where you'll be busy the night before your problem sets are due, but have lots of free time the other nights, although admittedly this can be smoothed out if you're not a horrendous procrastinator like I am.</p>
<p>As for MS&E, on the whole it's probably a little bit easier than Econ. It's certainly less mathematically rigorous--it has less reliance on formals models and is more of a "hands-on" kind of thing. At the end of the day, I don't think either is strictly preferred over the other from the perspective of the business world. I know plenty kids from both majors that got interviews with all the big names firms. As far as jobs go, how you'll fare there will have much more to do with your GPA, EC's and prior work experience than it will with choosing Econ over MS&E, or vice versa.</p>
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