<p>what's it like? how many hours a night do you guys usually have? how much time do you have to experience all the other great things stanford offers besides academics?</p>
<p>I’m worried about the same thing. How many courses do students usually take the first semester? I come from a pretty crappy public school and a decent but not particularly rigorous private school. I’ve never studied for anything and I’ve never, ever written anything longer than three pages… and hardly ever anything not in five paragraph format. I’m sure I can handle it what with tutoring services, but it is probably going to be really tough.</p>
<p>most classes are very reading-intensive and thought-intensive</p>
<p>i would assume there is probably not “homework” in most classes but i’m sure there will be many reading and problem sets assignments</p>
<p>my friends at stanford say it is a manageable amount</p>
<p>My high school sends about 5-7 kids to Stanford each year so I’ve heard about Stanford from some of them. They say its pretty hard to get below a B in most classes. But that’s just from a few kids so it probably isn’t a great representation of the entire student body.</p>
<p>Most students take their lightest load in first quarter.That allows for the student to get adjusted to college living and learning. The minimum is 12 credits but you can take 20 or 21. Our D is taking 12 this first qtr and 18 or 19 (I can’t remember exactly) next qtr.</p>
<p>Homework really depends on the class and how well you can get through the material. A Chemistry problem set might take 8 to 12 hours. (That’s how long it took D to do one over Thanksgiving. She does well in Chemistry but the work is time consuming) She was assigned Othello that had to be read in two days.</p>
<p>I think with proper time management there is plenty of time to study hard and party just as hard…but study first!!!</p>
<p>It depends on your major, although as a freshman, most people have comparable workloads. On an average weeknight, someone living in a freshman dorm might spend a couple of hours socializing and the rest of the night doing work. We often work in social environments, too, so it’s not uncommon for students to be working in groups or for you to just do your homework in your neighbor’s room because you want company. There ARE some people who just work all day and night seemingly without stopping, but those are usually the crazy people trying to double major in two engineering fields or trying to graduate in 3 years or something.</p>
<p>As you get deeper into your major, you might hit some harder, more time-consuming classes. ME101 and ME203 are a good examples. I’ve never taken it, but my friends who have say that there are weeks where this class will eat up 30 hours. Of courses that I’ve taken, CS108 was probably 20-30 hours per week during the final project. Phil151 was probably a solid 15-20 hours per week outside of lecture. CS210B had an epic conclusion where I spent 50 hours during the last week of the quarter working on our project. Those are a few of the more time- and life-consuming classes that come to mind.</p>
<p>Anyway, the hope is that by the time you’re into the upper-level classes, you’ll be doing stuff you’re interested enough in that you won’t mind spending a good chunk of time on it.</p>
<p>It is college, there is a good amount of home work here, but it is defiantly doable. It also greatly depends on the classes you are taking. Your math and science classes generally give more homework than your english/philosophy type classes.</p>
<p>Also, although your high does not seem that rigorous, I have not noticed any gap in intelligence between people that came from top privates and people that came from public schools. This is probably because once you get to the top of the heap in both private and public high schools, the students are pretty much equal. Bear in mind, this is comparing admitted students at Stanford, your average student at a top private high school is probably smarter than your average student at a public high school. I was not trying to undermine the values of quality private educations.</p>
<p>Now that I think about it this is probably the way grad/professional school works. You are more likely to get into a top grad school program if you went to a top undergrad university, but once people get to the top grad school the people who went to second tier universities are just as smart as the people who went to top privates because the students from the second tier school were at the top of the heap at that lower ranked school. I would like to know what people think about this.</p>
<p>Its totally doable, just don’t take more than 5 classes and you’ll be fine</p>
<p>I’m a freshman, and my general workload was physics was 4 hours a week, vector calculus was about 5 hours a week, and my IHUM was anywhere from 1-9. This is about 15 or so hours a week of work, which was generally pretty easy given there is so much free time in college.</p>
<p>ok getting a lot of sharply contrasting replies here. one person says “On an average weeknight, someone living in a freshman dorm might spend a couple of hours socializing and the rest of the night doing work.” while another says “about 15 or so hours a week of work” as a freshman, which is basically the direct opposite of what the other person said (i mean, if you spread out your work evenly across the week, you’d spend about 2-3 hours doing hw and the rest socializing/doing other stuff.) so…this is getting confusing.</p>
<p>Well, it depends on who you are and what classes you are taking, so obviously there are going to be contrasting replies. I’m thinking of doing three solid classes my first quarter (IHUM, hopefully PWR but if not then something else writing intensive, and a language) and then going to four or more from there. I think that should give me a really lax schedule. I want that, because I want to work on time management, writing, and the core basics of the language. I also want to work one shift per week, so I’ll see how that factors in as well. Then, in the fall and spring, I can pick up. I think I know where my weaknesses will lie, and I’m going to try to cater to that. So, as a freshman in the fall quarter, I think I will have an extremely light schedule. I may choose another course (a “soft” course) and decide whether to drop it.</p>
<p>but these people were supposedly generalizing, not just talking about their individual experiences…and they are almost directly opposite replies. i mean, i guess it depends on the individual but i’m getting scared by this thread cuz i don’t really wanna go to college just to work work work almost all the time. i’d rather do like 2-3 hours of work a night, join groups, develop friendships, have fun, etc. maybe most people at stanford DO want that work-intensive experience but that’s not really how I am so i’m trying to gauge if stanford would be a good fit for me.</p>
<p>Hah. You’re in for a surprise.</p>
<p>I think it depends a lot on the standards you set for yourself. If having straight As or close to it is what you have to have to feel good about yourself, you are going to be working very hard-especially if you are an engineering major. If you can live with Bs, you will obviously have more free time. Likewise, if you come from a demanding high school, where you were already working 4 hours/night and most of Sunday, you won’t find Stanford any different: Kids from schools where they didn’t have to study to make As, are all in shock after the first quarter. Lots of tears after those first mid-terms, as I recall, among kids who didn’t understand that everyone in the class was very smart and therefore the difference in grades was really a reflection of the amount of sitz fleisch you had invested. (And this is true at all the top schools, not just Stanford, so you have to decide what kind of college experience you are looking for.)</p>
<p>^what do you call “top schools”, though? cuz over at the ucla board, people are saying they only have about 2 hours of hw a night, if even that. :-/</p>
<p>I mean, whitecadillac, I think that’s a little unreasonable. 2-3 hours per night? I’m expecting to be IN CLASS about 15 hours per week. Then, probably 1-3 hours during the day and then 2-3 hours at night, plus 4-5 hours on Sunday. And I would consider that pretty light thinking. That’s 9 hours a day at school work during the school day and about half that at least one day during the weekend. That’s no more than you guys spend at high school, really. 9 hours a day at schoolwork still gives you 9 hours to enjoy yourself… so take a light course load or a light major.</p>
<p>well at my school, i’m in school for 3 hours a day and have like 2 hours (if that) a night, so 9 hours of schoolwork is a lot more for me. lol. i mean, last year, i had like 4-5 hours a night, but i didn’t like it obviously. and again, most people seem to agree that it’s MORE than 9 hours of schoolwork a day…ehhh, i dunno, i’ll probably still apply. but i’m just wondering why exactly i should be inclined to choose a really difficult school when i could choose another good school that is easier and allows for me to enjoy myself more before spending the rest of my life working all the time! it’s not like i want to go into business or engineering, etc, where the stanford name would really help. i want to be a screenwriter/filmmaker. hmmm…</p>
<p>Then why don’t you apply to schools that are less rigorous than Stanford? You’d save a boatload of money as well. Some of us don’t mind the school work - in fact, that’s the reason I’m going to college. If I just wanted a social life, or a lighter combination of the two, I could easily buy an apartment in a city with a roommate and attend their community college or a commuter school, making my own social interactions.</p>
<p>*well at my school, i’m in school for 3 hours a day and have like 2 hours (if that) a night, so 9 hours of schoolwork is a lot more for me. lol. i mean, last year, i had like 4-5 hours a night, but i didn’t like it obviously. and again, most people seem to agree that it’s MORE than 9 hours of schoolwork a day…ehhh, i dunno, i’ll probably still apply. but i’m just wondering why exactly i should be inclined to choose a really difficult school when i could choose another good school that is easier and allows for me to enjoy myself more before spending the rest of my life working all the time! it’s not like i want to go into business or engineering, etc, where the stanford name would really help. i want to be a screenwriter/filmmaker. hmmm… *</p>
<p>it sounds like you’ve made your decision. don’t apply.</p>
<p>“ok getting a lot of sharply contrasting replies here.”</p>
<p>Of course you are getting a lot of sharply contrasting replies. I will give you the two extremes of students here. Right above me I have some girls who are absolutely crazy. They blast Lady GaGa at 12:30 on week nights and drink all the time (I now know all the words to Bad Romance, Poker Face, Love Game, Just Dance, and Paparazzi). Compare that to the premed down the hall that seldom gets his head out of his text books.</p>
<p>There really is no average number of hours worked so all we can really go off of is our own experiences. It is college, you can work as much or as little as you want to and you live with the consequences of your decision. If you want to go for near strait As, something that I think nearly everyone here is smart enough to do, you need to work hard for it. If “Cs get degrees” is your mantra, then adjust your work load accordingly.</p>
<p>On a side note it is close impossible to fail out of here, you would have to really stop caring about school to get kicked out. I don’t know if you have to be a current Stanford student to look at CourseRank, but if you do not need to be one to look at it, it will show you the grade distributions for different classes at Stanford. The mean is typically a B+. With very few people getting below a C+.</p>
<p>Also, I agree with the previous posters. It sounds like you would not enjoy Stanford unless you became willing to work more. I can’t give you an average for the number of hours of work done per week (normally because people just do work, they don’t count the hours that they spend on homework), but I know that it is far more that what you are doing in high school.</p>