<p>Can any Econ majors(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.</p>
<p>Depending on what you take, it can vary a lot.</p>
<p>For instance, someone who is taking price theory, grad. algebra, hard statistics classes, etc. has anywhere from 30-50 hours of work per week. </p>
<p>More commonly, people will take the basic sequence, metrics, analysis, etc. and have around 10-15 hours of work per week.</p>
<p>Did the economics major with honors, and frankly, the students and workload is all over the place.
At the lower end, if you work in groups of 3-4 on the problem sets, divide up the task of summarizing the readings amongst friends, and take the less mathematical courses that lend themselves to this kind of setup, then you can fly through the major rather easily. It this sense it is more like business school, and a lot of the pre-banker / consulting crowd find this approach to be great since they use the free time for EC’s, attending firm events during their senior and junior years, and generally socializing. That said, for a lot of courses it is considered outright creating or at least intellectually shallow, but professors and TA’s seem not to care too much since these students tend to be on the lower side of the curve anyhow. Some really get the hang of it though and end up at the very best professional schools, but they are outliers. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, on the upper end, if you take four courses per term and opt into the harder ones (particularly in the math department at the UG level or at the grad level within economics proper), it can be nothing short of a 8-12 hour a day, seven days a week commitment (with many an late night interspersed since you will have other basic living tasks to attend to). This is only really necessary though if you want to go to graduate school for economics, which is very small slice of the student body. Some people though just take this upon themselves for the sheer challenge, even if they only want an MBA or a JD. When people think of the glory of U of C economics, they are thinking of this crowd. </p>
<p>To summarize, getting the BA in economics means totally different things to different people, with the rigor being very much student driven. It’s almost night and day by the end of four years.</p>
<p>What uca's saying about the BA in economics can be generalized to almost any major here.</p>
<p>We should put these "workload" questions into the same category as "chances" questions.</p>
<p>Both are impossible to answer in any kind of definitive way.</p>
<p>It's just as applicable to other schools, too. One can slide through a state flagship without taxing oneself, or one can dive in and go for the honors/early grad work and get the kind of academic experience one could get at many top-flight schools. It's just as easy to slide through an outstanding school without taking advantages of the opportunities available.</p>
<p>Add social life questions to that mix, too. I'm running out of elaborate ways to explain that you can do as you please in college, whether it be at this one or not.</p>