<p>How intense is a philo/econ double major from the scale of cloud 9 to scratching your eyes out and pouring salt into the wound?</p>
<p>I love and I hate questions like these. Perhaps the best way to explain my frustration is by contextualizing how I imagine you’re thinking and explain a little bit about how every college (UChicago included) works.</p>
<p>You are probably assuming that rigorous classes all include the same amount of rigor, and you probably think this because I assume you are signed up to take some quantity of AP or IB courses. And while AP and IB courses do vary in rigor from teacher to teacher and from school to school, there’s a commonly understood standard and a common language and syllabus to tie it all together. So you and somebody from another state could be trying to compare notes on how hard something is, and that person could say, “It’s like getting a 5 on AP Bio hard” and that language would make sense to you.</p>
<p>College… college is not at all like that. There is much more variation in rigor from class to class and from professor to professor. One professor’s A might be another’s B+. One student might spend 10 hours a week on homework that another completes in 3. Some students do the homework with a diligence unknown to this planet; others do what they have to do get a decent enough grade and move on with their lives. When you have access to course evaluations, you’ll see that I’m not making this up… this is just the way college tends to work.</p>
<p>What I CAN tell you, though, is that if you were admitted to UChicago you need not worry that the school is too hard for you; you will have more opportunities to make and correct any academic mistakes than you currently realize; that the college is invested in your own success; and that there is no way I can predict how much work you’ll spend completing two majors because there are simply too many variables at play to give you any kind of answer to this question that you’d want to hear.</p>
<p>42?</p>
<p>It’s as intense as you want it to be. It’s up to you to choose a major, and to further choose the level of difficulty of the classes you’ll be taking within the major (since students do have a bit of flexibility in fulfilling major requirements). Choose to take an honors section in Econ, and you’re in for a very intense 10 weeks. Choose the regular section, and you’re still in for a challenging but also more doable course. Choose to be an art history major, and essentially, it’s up to you how much time you want to put in. Choose to be a physics or compsci major and you’ll be enjoying some endless problem sets.</p>