<p>I have heard horror stories about people emerging from lectures with tears in their eyes. While I definitely appreciate a rigorous curriculum, I want my college experience to be about more than just academics.</p>
<p>S1 graduated after 4 years in June, has a good job with health benefits to show for it and is otherwise normal. I guess it’s manageable.</p>
<p>If it was unmanageable, I’m pretty sure the school wouldn’t churn out succesful graduates or have a super high first-year retention rate or even still be around. Yeah, it’s not easy, but it is very very manageable.</p>
<p>Not at all. UChicago is the college where no one, <em>no one</em>, ever graduates. </p>
<p>It’s that unmanageable.</p>
<p>Sombre, I was under the impression that Chicago graduated a good percentage of it’s students. Would you care to elaborate on your statement that no one graduates from Chicago?</p>
<p>You seriously haven’t heard? Chicago has literally had a 0% graduation rate for the last 79 years, ever since 1933 when Milton Friedman was the recipient of the first and last ever recorded degree. You didn’t think Milton Friedman got famous for his groundbreaking economic theories, did you?</p>
<p>There were rumors a while back that some nobody physicist named Carl Sagan got his Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD from Chicago, but such a feat is clearly ridiculous and is probably the making of someone trying to provoke the jealousy of Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle and 4th richest person in the world, who has apparently been angry ever since he was unable to successfully graduate from Chicago in 1963.</p>
<p>Ok, you are clearly being sarcastic. No need to pounce at me for asking an innocent question.</p>
<p>Chicago’s freshmen retention rate (the % of freshmen who return the next year as sophomores) is 99%, which puts it in a tie for 1st place among all US universities. I would guess that the workload is more than manageable.</p>
<p>I went to grad school here, so not sure my advice matters, but it was manageable. There is, obviously, a lot more work in grad school than college but that applies almost anywhere you go.</p>
<p>I am headed into my second year at UChicago, and I definitely do not think the work is unmanageable. Yes, the classes here are challenging, and yes, people sometimes do get worked up about them. You can also make things very difficult for yourself by deciding to take too many demanding/time consuming classes in the same quarter (for example, it would be very difficult to manage 3 lab-based science classes at the same time). If you give yourself a good balance of classes and use your time wisely, however, you can definitely find time for things other than academics.</p>