<p>You guys might want to check this out! :)
College</a> Majors That Are Most Demanding - Yahoo! Education</p>
<p>Using my powers of CC-perception, I predict this article will get slammed primarily because of #4. </p>
<p><em>pops popcorn</em></p>
<p>Yahoo makes up random lists like this and just switches up the majors every few months. For example they had best college degrees list one month (had the main players: accounting, engineering etc) but then the next month put it up again and this time with majors like: Graphic design, General Business admin etc.</p>
<p>Seems like a list of majors that mostly tend to be more popular at the more selective schools, presumably based on the assumption that the better students are more willing to do these majors, so they must be “more demanding”.</p>
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<p>If anyone does slam it specifically on #4, s/he would be misguided. While it is likely that many colleges have some humanities and arts courses that are widely considered “easy A” courses, majoring in those subjects, which necessarily includes taking some of the required-for-majors more difficult courses, can be quite rigorous.</p>
<p>ucb, I know they would be misguided. One of my degrees is in Arts & Humanities. But I also know CC :D</p>
<p>Note also that, going by the number of hours of out-of-class studying, even the “most demanding” major (engineering) lists an average of 19 hours. Add 15 hours of class time for a 15 credit unit course load, and we get 34 hours per week, which is significantly less than the standard metric of 3 hours per week per credit unit (should be 45 hours per week for a 15 credit unit course load). Now, even if the engineering major has courses with extra class time (e.g. two 3 hour labs per week in addition to 15 hours of lecture and discussion per week), that still only comes out to 40 hours per week.</p>
<p>So perhaps “most demanding” is relative, and students are not really being loaded that heavily with school work these days. Perhaps that may be because technology has significantly reduced time spent doing academic things, such as:</p>
<ul>
<li>Searching for references can be done with a web search instead of going to the library and digging through card catalogs or reading microfilmed journals.</li>
<li>CS programming assignments are easily done on one’s own cheap computer that is many orders of magnitude more powerful in CPU and memory than the shared computers past generations used in the computer lab.</li>
<li>Writing and editing term papers on computer word processing and publishing software is much easier and quicker than writing several drafts by hand and then typing up the final draft (and dabbing correction fluid over errors and retyping them).</li>
</ul>
<p>Accounting is definitely up there; even though I don’t find it that “hard”.</p>
<p>You need to study many hours of the day if you aim for accuracy and want to fully understand the material.</p>
<p>I have no idea how people who work full-time jobs and/or have kids manage to do this. Yikes</p>
<p>I find this list bizarre in that it doesn’t list specific majors, just areas - I know that for me, a history major would be much harder than an English major, just because of the way my brain works, but they’re both grouped as “arts and humanities” here. But I digress.</p>
<p>From a vanity point, I’m kind of happy to both biological and physical sciences up there (as a bio/chem person), but I wonder about their methodology. For example, I am in class, on average, eight hours per week more than my non-science peers because I typically have two four-hour labs in addition to the typical class load, but my classes are worth the same number of credits. I wonder whether that is a factor here as well.</p>
<p>Also, I don’t generally find the “three hours of study per credit hour” theory to be true, but I don’t necessarily think it means that students today aren’t working as hard. As you mentioned, ucbalumnus, we have computers today, making research, typing, etc. much speedier and more accessible, so assignments typically take less time. I typically put in 4-6 hours of work a night (sometimes more, but rarely less) and I feel like I have a really thorough understanding of my classes, athough they’re challenging. </p>
<p>I would also argue that in many classes, we learn a LOT more than students did forty, thirty, and even twenty years ago. Biology today is completely different, as are some higher-level chem and physics courses I’ve taken (and the professors have noted this). My understanding of genetics is significantly more in-depth than my parents’, because of the advancements that have been made since they were in college. As a result, there are a lot more specialized biology courses, where you can go in-depth into a few topics rather than cramming a wide-range of sometimes-unrelated information into your brain - so maybe it’s easier to understand, and do well in, courses such as biology, where we have a more thorough understanding of the science today? Just a thought; both my genetics professor and my Relativity professor made similar comments. My genetics prof said that he felt like we were learning more information than he had to, but that it would be much easier for us since we actually had the science to understand what we were learning, making it easier to make connections between topics that we’d learned.</p>
<p>boy are they right about engineering…why did i choose this major</p>
<p>I don’t find number 4 to be wrong at all.</p>
<p>I’d say the people I know with the most demanding major are typically music majors. They usually take way more classes than typical students. I know at USC, they’re required to take several courses that count as 0 credit hours, so when they’re taking 15-18 credit hours, they’re actually taking way more than 5-6 classes a week. On top of that, they have to practice, practice, and practice again. If they don’t, they move down to a lower chair or a lower band, which can cost them a scholarship. And then there are the actual rehearsals and performances of the different groups.</p>
<p>As a Theatre major, I’ve found that to be a pretty demanding major. Outside of class, I have had to read about as much as an English major (a new play every class), I have had to memorize lots of lines, and I’ve had to write a lot of papers. That doesn’t include the rehearsal time that I’ve had to put in with scene partners and what-not. Our labs require a minimum of 40 hours of work over a semester for just one credit hour, but they usually require much more than that. Last year, I remember having classes from 8-12, working from 12:30-5:00, and going to rehearsal from there for several hours. It left very little time for me to actually work on stuff for my other classes.</p>
<p>In general, I think every major has quite a load of work. Some may have more than others, but it’s all relative.</p>
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<p>Has completed one semester.</p>
<p>These majors seem to be in clusters and not actual specific majors. Case in point: “humanities” and not, for example, “History” or “English.” Besides, these lists do seem to be somewhat contrived, although I will also say that humanities majors are harder than most people give them credit for. I’d like to see some of my science major friends take on my workload and survive, because I know I couldn’t do their’s.</p>
<h1>1, list gains credibility.</h1>
<h1>4, list loses credibility.</h1>
<p>Lol at the poster complaining about their major one semester into freshman year</p>
<p>
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<p>Try EE or CS.</p>
<p>Re: #14</p>
<p>Theatre majors have to take courses involving practice and performance that can be as much time hogs as EE lab courses or CS courses with programming assignments. Don’t base the majors’ workload on the easy courses that non-majors take for breadth requirements.</p>
<p>Good luck trying to convince anyone, myself included, that a theater major involves as much demanding and difficult work as an engineering major</p>
<p>I kinda imagine it’s a little easier spending five hours memorizing a play than it is spending five hours trying to write/debug a sizable program in C++…</p>
<p>^I’m not saying that it’s easier.</p>
<p>But it is all relative. If you don’t have people skills, being a theatre major is going to be extremely difficult. If you don’t like arts or theatre, then being a theatre major is going to be a heck of a lot of work.</p>
<p>Mind you, I have lots of friends in ‘difficult’ majors. I know how much work they put in. All I’m saying is that a Theatre major requires way more work than most people imagine. People see a finished product of a play. They see two hours. They don’t see the weeks and months of rehearsal, the number of meetings that go on, the warm ups before performances and rehearsals, the time it takes to prepare for rehearsals, the time it takes to design, make, build, tear down, and rebuild sets and costumes. The stress load of putting on a show is extremely high.</p>
<p>Is it necessarily ‘harder’ than engineering or science? No. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less demanding. Time is precious and as a college student, it can be difficult to keep up with everything that’s required of a major.</p>
<p>Anyways, if you enjoy computer science, but you hate theatre, then theatre would probably be a lot harder for you than computer science. Same if it is reversed. Things tend to be easier, or at least seem easier, for people who enjoy them.</p>
<p>My S is currently planning to double major in physics and math (#2 on the list) and minor in music (#4). So far the most demanding classes for him were the music theory classes. </p>
<p>I am curious – what majors are not on this list? With those categories being so broad (physical sciences, social sciences, …) it looks like they covered everything.</p>
<p>The list is pointless in that sense because it compares apples and oranges. I agree with AUGirl, from my own observations. If you are a slow reader, then you would make a poor English major and would have difficultly finishing the workload required in one night. Additionally, if you have a poor understanding of calculus, physics would not be a sensible major. I wouldn’t say one major is harder than another, both just have different requirements and therefore have different obstacles and difficulties within them. </p>
<p>As I said before, I would like some of the math or science majors I know try to be English majors. They would not survive, and I would not survive in their world.</p>