<p>I looked at the requirements for both majors on the UChicago website and saw that there is a remarkable overlap between the two fields. I am interested in majoring in economics, but I'm not really that good at math. The website seems to show that the econ major is as much math as actual economics. Does this mean it'll be hard for me to pursue economics at UChicago?</p>
<p>Economics is very math-based. That’s true pretty much everywhere. Most colleges offer some sort of “math-lite” path through an economics major, and even at Chicago the actual amount of math economics majors need to master will vary considerably from one person to the next, depending on the courses they take. If in fact you are “not really that good at math,” you could probably pick your way through the economics major as long as you were able to learn the basic math necessary. (Which, by the way, is only a couple quarters more of math courses than you will need to satisfy the Core anyway.) Chicago graduates hundreds of Economics majors every year, and not all of them are math geniuses, not by a long shot.</p>
<p>You should probably reserve judgment on your math skills, too. Take the math courses you have to take, and see what happens. College math is fairly different from high school math, and learning math because there’s something interesting you want to do with it (economics) is different from learning it in a vacuum. So you may turn out to be somewhat better at math than you think. Or, in the alternative, if you give it a fair shot and decide that you really dislike math and have trouble learning it at the college level, you may find yourself naturally thinking about other majors where your math issues won’t restrict what you can learn so considerably.</p>