<p>Is 18 hours too many to take first semester freshman year?</p>
<p>Depends on courses and person. Usual load is about 15 to 16 hours. Overloading first semester is usually not a good idea because you really have no experience yet to know what you can personally handle in college. Colleges have many overachieving high school seniors who come in with high high school grades and an ego that makes them believe they can handle any load, take 18 hours, and soon find themselves in serious trouble and close to flunking out. Then again some of those do stellar. </p>
<p>In addition what those 18 hours are can make a difference. As many learn, it is often not the number of hours that determine the difficulty of the semester but the number of different courses. If you have only 5 courses or less it is easier to do 18 than if you have 6 courses or more. Also, if that load has a number of science and math courses, such as it would be for engineering, it can be extremely difficult. What happens is that such courses have more classroom hours than specified. A typical 3 hour college course means you go to class three hours a week. But a course in chemistry, biology or physics which may be divided into a 3 hour lecture course and and 1 hour lab can actually meet 7 hours a week. That 3 hour lecture course may include an extra hour per week of a discussion/quiz section with a TA in a small group and any one hour lab is actually 3 hours per week. Thus, you end up having a lot more than 18 hours of classroom time weekly. Moreover, science, math and engineering courses often require a lot more homework time than others.</p>
<p>That’s what I was thinking. A friend’s daughter was telling me how she was taking 18 hours (they told her at registration that she had to sign up for 16) and based on my older kids (at a different college) I just knew that was too much for her. Plus they let her sign up for back-to-back classes on opposite sides of campus. They told her she could “just leave the first class 5 minutes early.”</p>
<p>I wouldn’t take 18, even if you can probably handle it. There’s way too many fun things happening first semester that you want to have time to enjoy. It is stressful enough as it without having a heavy course load.</p>
<p>I have yet to take the full 18 hours here as a student. I haven’t actually needed to and I like spreading things out more. Plus, school is a lot, but it’s nowhere close to encompassing all of the opportunities that there are on this campus: clubs, research, internships, sports, etc. You’ve got to save time to be involved.</p>