<p>I would love to hear from college students at Northeastern who had very high ACT's or SAT's or were National Merit Finalists.... have the classes been challenging for you? High School has been too easy for my son, and I sure would like for college to be more of a "struggle."
Thanks!!</p>
<p>My daughter is a freshman at NU - NM commended with high stats and she got a nice deans scholarship and is in the honors program. Almost all of the friends she has in honors are kids with very high stats (NM final or commended) but they are very down to earth kids - you will not find intellectual snobs here. They are not the kind of kids who discuss how great their stats were or how many AP credits they have. That being said - none of them are breezing through their classes - they are working hard (she is hanging out with the nerdy crowd so many engineers and computer majors - which are hard programs). She is not at all struggling - but she is very conscientious and puts in the needed time (reads all required reading, does all homework even if not graded, etc.) She is learning a ton of stuff and enjoying her classes. It is definitely a great place for the right type of smart kid!</p>
<p>I’m currently a third year with NM scholarship. From other schools/friends, I know of 2 potential problems as a smart/scholarship student: the intellectual snobbery mentioned above, and classmates looking down on you for having to get a scholarship to come there. I haven’t experienced either of these. I’ve got a bunch of smart, great friends.</p>
<p>As for classes, I took a lot of really challenging classes in high school (IB diploma, college math), so I ended up finding my first semester to be relatively easy, straight-forward and not over-stressful, despite the fact that I skipped out of a number of intro classes with IB/AP credit. After that, though, I have intentionally taken challenging classes. It keeps me busy, and it can be stressful, but I have put in the effort and kept up my GPA.</p>
<p>@nanotechnology: I got accepted to NU yesterday. I’m still waiting to hear from a few other unis but currently NU is my top choice 
I’m going to be doing pre-med and I was wondering if you’re doing pre-med or know somebody who is? If so, how is it? Is it hard/easy to maintain a 3.7 GPA (minimum required for the GAdmissions at Tufts Med school)? how are the classes? Is pre-med track popular among students? thanks!</p>
<p>In my classes, it was sort of a toss up. It was (insanely, to me) easy to get a B+, and even an A- in most classes was pretty straightfoward. As were sometimes hard, especially if the professor liked to curve or if it was a really subjective topic. However, I did just like what the posters above said. I’d take two simple classes that I knew I could get an A in by showing up and doing the paper at the end, and then I’d take two classes that were pretty hard (which was easy to find, as a math major). I literally studied for 15 hours straight with no break for my Real Analysis class midterm.</p>
<p>What I liked though was that, unlike some tougher schools that are notorious for hard, rigorous classes, when I put in the effort to get an A, I actually got it. I think it would have driven me nuts if I worked super hard and still got a A-. Northeastern felt like a good medium.</p>
<p>It is moderately hard to keep a 3.7. Not too many people do it. But it is definitely very possible (coming from a 3.9 grad). For some perspective, 3.75 is summa cum laude.</p>
<p>Pre-med is very popular, but it is not so much of a track (even though they call it that) and more so just you meeting with the pre-med advisors to make sure you take the required bio, chem and physics classes. However most “pre-med” end up not applying or attending med school. They just decide after a few years that they don’t want to, or they choose to party/etc instead of putting in the work.</p>
<p>I think the answer to your question depends a lot on the individual student. </p>
<p>My son was a NMF. He will be graduating in May with a CS degree and a math minor. Like your son, he also breezed through HS while earning 50+ AP credits. We were disappointed that he was not challenged by any of the classes he took at NEU. He will have earned above a 3.75 during his 4 yr/2 co-op stint… though he rarely attended classes (despite my pleadings to do otherwise!). If it were not for the amazing co-op experience and the resulting (and equally amazing) job offer he received this past fall, he would say it was a waste of 4 yrs. Like neuchimie, he has frequently described his classes as “insanely easy.” </p>
<p>One thing that helped my son was that he met a very similar student so he had someone to commiserate with. They were buddied up for many of the assignments (common in CS classes) and challenged each other. They always went above and beyond the requirements given for each task.</p>
<p>With all that said, I’ll also point out that my son came in with loads of self-taught prior knowledge…something that’s “easy” to do these days in regard to computer programming if you have the motivation and that sort of brain (I don’t!).</p>
<p>@NEUMom2009:
If you had to do it over again, where would you send your son?
My son is thinking about double majoring with Political Science and either CS or Statistics. He does all of his homework and is straight A’s, but never has to study and thinks that high school is easy (even though he has tons of extra curriculars too). I would hate to invest a bunch of time and money and not even have him go to class!</p>
<p>A lot of it is also what you choose to make of it.
For example, behavioral neuroscience has a lot of elective options in it. You could choose to take a course which will give you an easy A in which you won’t learn as much, or you could take a more challenging class that won’t guarantee the grade. For example, I took a graduate course in human neuroanatomy my sophomore year, which was definitely not the easiest option, but I learned a lot (and worked hard and did get the A).
I’m minoring in CS, and I would ray the same is also likely true for that: there are options. And that’s also a major where it’s more plausible for students to have a very wide span of prior knowledge.</p>
<p>There is no statistics major/minor - it would have to be math. </p>
<p>I think you can get away with not attending classes for things like CS but not for many other subjects. My daughter (only a freshman) has had a couple of classes each semesters where they received a participation grade (so attendance was required). Different subjects have different challenges. If you do all your homework in a history class you will most likely be reading 100-150 pages a week which you will have to understand well enough to discuss in class. For most students that will be challenging. I think PoliSci will have similar requirements.</p>
<p>Let’s face it some kids will skip class regardless of the school they go to, so all schools have kids who skip.</p>
<p>My son is an NMF in the honors program and is a combined Math/Econ major. He has worked very hard but that could be because he entered the school with no AP classes so he has had to get to the level that other kids entered at.</p>
<p>He goes to class and has gone for extra help with professors and TA’s-I have no concerns whatsoever that he is getting a good education. Is it MIT? I don’t think so-but for his level he is getting more than enough challenge with the academics. In fact, it is far more challenging than he would like and more than either of us expected.</p>
<p>@GrettasMom: </p>
<p>If we were given a do-over, where would my son go? As a NMF, my son went to NEU tuition free. He has $0 loans. If we were footing the entire bill, my answer would probably be different, but given our circumstances, I think we’d still choose NEU. </p>
<p>Why? The reasons are many. Having a full time job lined up in the Fall of your senior year…which pays an astoundingly high salary for a 21 yr old, with great benefits, and having him doing what he loves–isn’t that why we all go to college? He didn’t learn much about computer programming in class, but thanks to the type of learner he is and his self-taught knowledge, he obviously knows his stuff and is good at it or he wouldn’t have landed the job. </p>
<p>While his formal learning was minimal, he learned so much outside of the classroom. We have been big believers in the co-op model for a long time. His 2 co-op experiences were top notch and taught him so much about the workplace. Living in a big city was a change for him and full of life lessons. As part of the NMF program at NEU he is required to complete 100 hours volunteering each year. While he’s a great kid, that’s something he wouldn’t have done on his own. He works as a tutor for inner city kids…again a wonderful learning experience. </p>
<p>We never had any concerns about our son doing well in college, regardless of where he’d end up. Thankfully, he is and has always been a very motivated learner and an excellent student. As nanotechnology pointed out college is what you choose to make of it. My son’s APs gave him credit for the vast majority of his electives. Almost all of the classes he took were required for his CS major or math minor and thus his choices were limited. He is a voracious learner. He wanted to go to classes and be wow-ed by stuff he didn’t already know. But that didn’t happen very often. Thankfully, he found other avenues to challenge himself. While skipping class he was in his apartment writing apps (and making $) for Boston businesses that learned about his skills by word of mouth. He also was sought out and hired by NEU as a paid tutor for a couple of the CS classes. He turned down an similar offer from the math dept due to lack of time. He wasnt sleeping all day instead of going to classes. He was learning in other ways.</p>
<p>As I started my initial reply, the answer to your question about how challenging NEU is depends a lot on the individual student. I only replied as the responses you were getting didn’t reflect our experience. My son was in a unique position in that he came to college with lots of prior knowledge…something that would have held true no matter where he went. Sounds like most of the top tier kids are satisfied with NEU and are being challenged and that’s the way it should be. But, if your kid is like mine (or his friend that I mentioned in my previous post), that might not be the case. </p>
<p>With co-op being the main reason wed chose NEU again, I highly suggest you research what sorts of co-op positions would be available to kids in his major. I dont know anything about Political Science co-ops, but I do know that the co-op program is successful with some majors more than others. If it werent for the huge potential benefit that most CS majors get from the co-op program, we never would have considered NEU.</p>
<p>Good luck to you and your son. I hope hes happy and challenged in some way no matter where he goes! :)</p>