<p>I’ve taken a couple of psychology courses, and so far it seems that while it isn’t difficult to keep up with the readings (remember, you’ll only have class a few days a week), prelims will test you on the little, often hard-to-remember details in the textbook. I’ve found it very helpful to take notes or highlight my readings so that it’s easier to pick out the important information when I go back to study. Also, if you start to get bogged down (or just lazy) and don’t keep up, you’ll find it almost impossible to cram come prelim time. In short - it’s not hard to keep up, but it’s just as easy to tell yourself that you don’t need to read the assigned chapters until later, and that’s when you’re in trouble.</p>
<p>Is the intro HDFS sequence still perceived as a worthy alternative to psych 101?
In my day Bronfenbrenner was teaching it, he was a very big deal in the field and the course was very highly regarded. It deals with what to me is the most applicable and interesting part of psychology, how people change over the lifespan, rather than focusing on other topics. E.g., to me, the biology details underlying perception, touch, etc, should best be left to the biology department, it is not what I come to a psych course to learn. yet these were part of an intro psych course I took (not at Cornell though). YMMV.</p>