I am going to Duke in the fall, and I am in the Genetics and Genomics FOCUS cluster. While I’m very excited about the program, I was wondering what the workload is like for the classes. I’m not afraid of a challenge, but I don’t want to overwhelm myself first semester. I know I will be taking a foreign language (either Chinese or German, still not completely sure) and one other class. Would honors chemistry be a massive workload on top of these classes? Or would taking either a sociology or dance class be more manageable for first semester? I don’t want to over do it with my coarse load, but I also don’t want to under do it either.
Hi 
TL;DR: You’re going to be okay with FOCUS, a language class, and a chemistry class, even if you do decide Chinese and Honors Chem. But there will a difference in the work load depending on what you decide to do - read on.
FOCUS classes are awesome! They’re small classes and you’ll meet people with similar interests. The professors all know it’s your first semester. I was in a FOCUS and all my friends who did their FOCI(?) said it was a walk in the park/very fun. The classes are not meant to be hard but should help you feel more confident about your ability to succeed in college.
Chinese, especially if you are not Chinese and will be starting Chinese 101, it is going to be a lot of work. It is 5 times a week and the material is hard if you’ve never been exposed to Chinese before. Now, tons of people take Chinese and love it and would do it again, so this is not meant to freak out you but rather prepare you mentally if you want to go down this path. I have heard only great things from the German department and my friends love learning German. Linguistically speaking, from English, German is definitely an easier language to learn than Chinese.
Is honors chemistry, by any chance, Chem 110? If so, the question here is are you pre-med? If you’re not pre-med, feel free to take whatever you want and ignore the next paragraph.
This is going to sound mercenary, but stay with me. If you are pre-med, then you would need to start protecting your GPA for med school. It’s much harder to raise your GPA than you think. Med school won’t care if you took Honors Chem (Chem 110) or regular Chem (Chem 101). They both fulfill 1 semester of inorganic chemistry equally and the med school will only look at GPA. Word on the street is if you have a strong chem background and haven’t placed into Orgo 201, it’s almost better to do very well in chem 101 (which covers the same material as AP-level chem) than to risk it it honors chem. I personally just skipped straight into Orgo, but that’s what I’ve heard.
Thank you so much! This is the most helpful information I’ve read so far.
Correction: Chinese 101 meets 4 days a week, but I just checked and it looks full with some people on the waitlist right now.
German also meets 4 days a week, and there are still openings.
I want to say all (?) of the beginner level languages meet at least 4 times a week, so essentially how much time you need to devote to it outside of class will be determined by how hard the language is to learn.