<p>You've probably heard a lot of this before, but I thought I'd share anyway.</p>
<p>ACADEMICS
*Don't study for the placement exams.
*Be prepared to get bad grades and not freak out over them. My first midterm grade here was the second lowest in the class. But at the end of the quarter I finished with an above average grade.
*Work hard. Put 100% effort into everything, because professors respect hard working students and, if they like you, will open doors you didn't know even existed.(In particular, offering research assistantships, directing you to good programs, etc.)
*Even if you're planning on taking three classes, register for four. That way you can drop the one you like the least.<br>
*It's easy to get into graduate classes. I've heard of first years in language classes, second years in bio grad classes, third years in physics grad classes, etc. Question is, can you actually handle them?</p>
<p>CHICAGO
*Don't carry a purse into Chicago.
*Always keep money on your CTA card (which you'll get at the beginning of the year). If you have it on you it's $2/swipe onto the bus. But if you don't you need to pay $2.25 in cash and they don't give change, so if you've only got a $20, you're screwed.
*CTA trip planner will be your best friend if you're the kind of person who loves the city. You can put the exact time you're leaving and the exact time you need to be back and it'll give you bus routes and arrival times.
*Keep an eye out for student discounts on opera/theater/concert tickets and museum free days. </p>
<p>OTHER
*Don't worry about making friends. It takes a little longer for some people, but by now pretty much everyone's found their "group" and made good friends.
*Be proactive. Work-study jobs get snapped up quickly, so start searching as early as possible (maybe even the end of the summer). It's also quite easy to get officer positions in RSOs as a first-year.
*Start searching for summer employment/internships/lab positions in winter quarter. DON'T PROCRASTINATE ON THIS. Have a backup in case your first choice doesn't work out.</p>
<p>As a fellow member of the class of 2013, I agree with all of this.</p>
<p>Just to add some things:</p>
<p>Just get a Chicago Card Plus for the CTA. It’s really annoying to have to keep worrying about how much you have on the card, so just get the fancy card that’s linked to your bank account or credit card. You can check the balance online, and it automatically refills. I’ve been in way too many situations where I’ve been in a group and someone has to put money on their card as the train leaves the station, meaning you wait 10 minutes for the next one. The Chicago Card Plus is free the first time you apply, as long as you put $20 on it to start.</p>
<p>If you really want to live the good life, get a phone with internet. I don’t have this, and I really really really wish I did. It just makes checking your email and using the CTA so much easier.</p>
<p>Definitely start searching for jobs in August, especially if you’re not work-study. Apply absolutely everywhere. </p>
<p>Be nice to people you meet. All of them. Even if you don’t like so and so, just be nice anyway. It makes your life so much better when you can have a conversation with anyone who happens to be around. And the unhappiest people here are the ones who are really abrasive off-putting toward others.</p>
<p>Finally, don’t lose things. Losing your ID, keys, wallet, phone, etc. just isn’t something you’ll want to deal with. Figure out a way to keep track of all your important belongings. This means not carrying your ID and phone in your hand. Or sticking things in random piles in your room. A little organizational skill goes a long way in college.</p>
<p>As in don’t do it. At all. People will say you can look over formulas or whatever, but you really don’t even need to do that. The placement exams are designed such that studying is really a waste of time, as the knowledge they look for isn’t really specific enough to require studying.</p>
<p>Right. From what I have seen, they are basically pretty simple. If you understand something, the relevant question will be easy. If you don’t understand it, the question will bring that out. There aren’t that many questions – just enough to cover the representative topics. They aren’t designed to distinguish between someone who has done A- work and someone who has done A or B+ work (which is what most high school tests do). They are designed to assess who understands a broad area of inquiry completely and who doesn’t.</p>
<p>Why in the world would anyone want to try to fool the placement test? Let’s posit for the moment that you COULD cram for a test and give the appearance of understanding a topic on which you don’t really have full command. Congratulations, you’ve won! Your reward is that you will be placed in a course that will be hard and demanding for people who REALLY understood what the test was testing. In a few days (weeks, if you are unlucky), your lack of true understanding will become a critical problem, at which point you will either have to do the work of two courses to catch up and stay current, or you will have to drop back into the perfectly challenging course you should have taken in the first place, where you will now be behind everyone else. </p>
<p>Why do that? The placement tests do a good job of sorting kids into the classes they need most, and will benefit most from. Go with the flow, not against it.</p>
<p>Well, my son told me that the Latin placement test consisted of three short paragraphs – 2-3 sentences each. The first was simple – anyone who had passed 1st year Latin could do a good job. The second was basically at the level of Cicero, stuff he was familiar with. The third was the hardest thing he had ever seen; he was completely unfamiliar with the grammar, and there was lots of vocabulary he didn’t know. He knew where he would place by looking at the test.</p>
<p>Phuriku and others have described the math placement test. It’s a little bit longer, but not that much – maybe 40 questions, and three proofs. But I think the theory is the same: Easy if you know it, “huh?” if you don’t, little gray area.</p>
<p>The perfect placement test would have x questions, and for any particular student x-y questions would be easy as pie, 1 question would be challenging, and y-1 questions would be impossible.</p>
<p>Since this seems to be a common theme, I’ll say this:</p>
<p>Stop freaking out. Now. I’m not saying that any of you are necessarily doing this, but freaking out about placement tests is the first step in freaking out about everything else that happens first quarter. And freaking out is not something you want to do. The people who perform the best here are the ones who can approach their studies in a calm and collected way. So when we tell you to just chill out about the placement tests, please listen to us. This advice will also apply when you have a problem set that you don’t understand and a paper that you don’t know how to start due on the same day.</p>
<p>I know that the wait until September is excruciating, and you feel like you’re wasting your life when everyone else leaves for college. But don’t channel that by freaking out about placement tests or whatever. You’ll need to be calm to do well at the U of C, and it’s a good idea to practice being calm before you get here.</p>
<p>Can you elaborate on the obtaining summer employment and internships starting winter quarter part? How would one go about in obtaining an internship/employment? Who would be the people to contact? Why winter quarter?</p>
<p>It’s not that you HAVE to do everything winter quarter–lots of people don’t start searching until the last minute and it turns out fine–but it makes life so much easier if you know what you’re going to do early on. And there are always people who start searching too late and don’t get anything. </p>
<p>The other thing is that many internships have deadlines as early as February or March. So you don’t want to find out about something until after the deadline has already passed. And think of all the stuff you have to do in order to apply: write essays and fill out applications, produce letters of recommendation (if necessary), set up interviews (by phone or in-person), all on top of classes. Personally I would use winter break to make a list of all the things you want to apply to, and start filling out applications then. Then you’ll be busy with finals, and then during early spring quarter you can start submitting/interviewing. Also, have a back-up plan, even if it’s just working your high school retail job. Sometimes things do fall through, through no fault of your own. </p>
<p>If you’re a science major looking for a lab job (especially a paid one), you have to realize that the lab positions at UChicago fill up relatively quickly. This is especially bad if you’re a first year with relatively little experience. Also, professors at other schools are a lot less likely to respond to your emails. Typically, UChicago professors will respond to your emails, but my friends and I have had something like a 30% response rate from professors at other institutions, with <10% of those actually being a positive “yes, you can work in the lab.”</p>
<p>One exception is that if you’ve done very well in a class or you’ve been working for a lab during the school year, a professor might offer to pay you to stay with them for the summer. Other exceptions are kids who have done tons of research already or have connections to academia. </p>
<p>Certain advisors, by the way, are awful and will tell you that you don’t need to worry about the first summer. The problem is that when you start applying for internships the second summer everyone else will have the cool internship they did the first summer on their resume and you will have…nothing.</p>