<p>I'm entering uMich as a freshman this fall and will be majoring in Economics. I want to make the most out of your advice so that I can succeed at Michigan. I'll be the first in my family to attend college so I can't ask my parents. How did your study habits change? Did you find yourself studying while pulling less than 5 hours of sleep? What are your current studying skills in Michigan? Will I have lock myself in my room?</p>
<p>There is absolutely no reason to not get enough sleep due to studying. You won’t have to lock yourself in. It’s not as bad as people will usually tell you but it is a lot more rigorous than high school. You get a lot more time to study during college than high school in most cases, too, so it won’t usually feel like a ton. I studied only moderately in high school and I probably doubled my studying, maybe a little more.</p>
<p>I definitely studied more in high school than in college, just because it’s more rigorous and the competition is more fierce/way smarter. Despite that my college GPA is way higher than my high school’s.</p>
<p>For comparison
High school:
I on average did homework/projects for say 7-8 hours a week in high school (probably would have been more but I never did any studying for my math and science classes). Classes unfortunately were mandatory, so there are a lot of wasted hours spent in classes. </p>
<p>College:
Study/schoolwork time is probably like 4-5 hours a week, including going to classes that take attendance. Given that you are doing econ it should require even less time, plus a lot of classes in that major are lectures so you don’t really need to show up which saves even more time.</p>
<p>There is no reason to not have 9 hours of sleep a day and still have a lot of time for entertainment except for cramming time right before exams/big problem sets/projects. There’s a lot more free time in college than in high school. In hindsight, I felt like I wasted a lot of my life doing nothing when in college because there’s so little that needs to be done. I wish I used that time to do more meaningful things, like trading and stuff.</p>
<p>Bearcats is God’s gift to Earth so treat him as an outlier.</p>
<p>A little sarcasm brightens up the day! Thanks.
In all seriousness, most of the peers in my circle feel the same way, at least about the college piece.</p>
<p>If you went to an elite high school like TJ or Stuyvesant or Harvard Westlake, then Michigan’s academics will not be all that challenging and you can probably get away with studying just 4-5 hours a week assuming a regular 4 course schedule.</p>
<p>If you went to some hick high school in the Upper Penninsula though, Michigan’s academics will seem like MIT or Caltech’s in comparison with up to 50 hours or more of studying required per week.</p>
<p>So it depends.</p>
<p>I don’t know. I think 4/5 hours per week for studying and doing homework seems low. Unless you’re some sort of genius or you really don’t care (I have some friends in the latter category, and they barely managed to get a 3.0 GPA…), you’re going to be working more than that, IMO. </p>
<p>I went to a decent public MI high school and didn’t study at all, even for finals, and I probably only had 3/4 hours per week of homework. At Michigan, I definitely study more than that. I’d say I averaged 8 hours per week of work first semester and 10 hours second semester. And I still managed to get 9/10 hours of sleep per night, but I made a point to never have a class before 10 am bc I need a lot of sleep and I can’t concentrate at all when I’m tired. </p>
<p>In all, you’ll get here, you’ll see what’s expected of you from your courses, and you’ll figure out what works for you. You might have to study a lot more than it seems a lot of your classmates have to, and that’s fine. But you will have time to have fun, too. It’s not all work, 24/7. :)</p>
<p>Your major and how you do work both matter as well</p>
<p>@goldenboy, you mentioned Stuyvesant, but how about Bronx Science? </p>
<p>How much studying should I expect as a ChE major for the following classes?:
CALC116, CHEM210/211, ENGR101 (with no prior experience in coding/programming)</p>
<p>How frequently are exams administered, how are they curved, and how much does each exam (and final) weigh on your grade? (particularly interested in the above listed classes, but if you can generalize, that’s fine too).</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>Three or four credit classes will typically give two to four exams. Just about every class has a final, though it isn’t always an exam and can sometimes be a presentation or a research paper, etc. and most classes have at least one or two midterms. Labs typically have an exam or two, though this isn’t always the case. If you take sixteen credits, you can expect to take around ten or twelve exams throughout the course of the semester, often on the same day or within one or two days of each other, especially during finals. Though I know people who this past semester only had a few exams because their classes were heavily paper-based. I typically begin studying for a given exam two or three days beforehand depending on the amount of material and the class and have only done what I would consider poorly once.</p>
<p>Some classes will weigh exams differently, others will weigh them the same. I had a class with three exams that were all weighted 30% of the grade, but calc has three exams that are weighted 25-30-40% in that order. I’m not sure about engineering nor chem as I have not taken it yet.</p>
<p>“If you went to an elite high school like TJ or Stuyvesant or Harvard Westlake, then Michigan’s academics will not be all that challenging and you can probably get away with studying just 4-5 hours a week assuming a regular 4 course schedule.”</p>
<p>Perhaps that was your experience at Duke as well. Then again, if you found Duke very challenging, perhaps your high school wasn’t too elite.</p>
<p>
Or so he thinks anyways.</p>
<p>And rjk- I know plenty of Harvard Westlake and Bronx Science kids at Michigan that don’t stand out as abnormally smart among the student body by any means. Everyone has to put the work in. It’s not a ridiculous or unreasonable amount for most people but it does definitely require significant dedication.</p>
<p>College requires more study. Simple as that </p>
<p>Its too bad bearcats never had to work hard in college. I wonder why he went to Michigan over more rigorous schools.</p>
<p>College is quite different than High School. In high school, your teachers probably gave you many assignments to make sure you were on track. The tests and exams were likely straightforward and as long as you did everything the teacher asked, you would get an A. At U of M it is your responsible to fully learn the material on your own. You actually get less homework but the exams are a lot more difficult. They test to see if you know the material WELL and if you know it well enough to apply it. If you don’t study, you will fail. If you do the bare minimum the professor asks you, you will likely get a C in the class. My advice if you want A’s would be to spend a good amount of time right after lecture to fully understand the material that was covered. This way, it will be easier to review when the exam comes as they cover a lot of info and it is hard to cram all the material at once. When you review, keep doing practice questions until you are very confident with the material.</p>
<p>4-5 hours of studying/week? LOL! I personally studied 3-5 hours/day, depending on the course load, and I struggled to maintain a 3.4-3.5 GPA. Admittedly, grading at Michigan (and at most universities) has gotten laxer in recent years, but if one wants to do well and keep up, I would say at least an average of 3 hours of studying/day unless, as Jen101 put it, your a genius, or do not care about maintaining a good GPA.</p>
<p>Simply put, Michigan is academically demanding and intense, obviously not to the extent of Chicago or MIT, but pretty similar to places like Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern and Penn from what I have observed. Also, while Econ as a subject is not that difficult, it is now straight forward and at a school like Michigan, where many Econ majors also wish to apply to Ross, the competition can at times be strenuous. </p>
<p>This said, one can easily attend all of one’s classes, study three-four hours per day, hang out with friends and still get 7-8 hours of sleep.</p>
<p>“And rjk- I know plenty of Harvard Westlake and Bronx Science kids at Michigan that don’t stand out as abnormally smart among the student body by any means. Everyone has to put the work in.”</p>
<p>That comment was directed at goldenboy.</p>
<p>“If you went to an elite high school like TJ or Stuyvesant or Harvard Westlake, then Michigan’s academics will not be all that challenging and you can probably get away with studying just 4-5 hours a week assuming a regular 4 course schedule.”</p>
<p>Are you insinuating that Michigan academics are not rigorous Goldenboy? Would you say that academics at other top 10 universities are more intense and demanding? I have no basis for comparison between Michigan and fellow top universities, but I do between Michigan and Cornell, and I would say the two are roughly the same in terms of academic intensity. </p>
<p>I attended a British patterned high school that was very demanding (as demanding as any high school in the US). I personally found Michigan academics challenging.</p>
<p>And by the way, the regular course schedule at Michigan is 5, not 4.</p>
<p>“If you went to an elite high school like TJ or Stuyvesant or Harvard Westlake, then Michigan’s academics will not be all that challenging and you can probably get away with studying just 4-5 hours a week assuming a regular 4 course schedule.”</p>
<p>Definitely not “a week.” Will you be prepared for 3.8+ GPA with any means necessary coming from those institutions? Absolutely. </p>
<p>Oh and btw underclassmen years at TJ is absolutely joke compared with underclassmen years at a good university, on average. But of course, it matters entirely on what classes you take.</p>
<p>Anyway to actually stay on point and give some helpful advice, the amount of time you study in University is far more than high school, but you have a lot more time to do it.</p>
<p>You do not have a generic 8 AM to 3PM schedule 5 days a week. You will be in class far less but covering more material at a deeper level. </p>
<p>As for sleep, it really is like the impossible trinity of Sleep-Academics-Social. But still, there’s no reason to be consistently getting less than 5 hours of sleep unless its finals crunch time or some project/paper/etc is due.</p>
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<p>Bluedevilsfan is right. This is probably the most important lesson to realize before you get to college. Sure you’ll have more time outside of classes to study, but you have to learn to study in an way that’s efficient for you. A lot of times high school study habits won’t cut it in college - very few people can cram the night before an exam and actually do well. </p>
<p>Something I really encourage is taking advantage of office hours if you have questions. Some people think that office hours is for schmucks, but it’s pretty much the best time to get individual or small group help from professors. And if you have conflicts with another class or something and ask nicely, many professors are happy to meet at another time.</p>