<p>Hi! I applied this year to JHU and it is tied for my top choice. I recently received an offer to play a sport for the school, and I was wondering how difficult it is to balance athletics and academics. I played ~14 (anywhere from 8 to 20) hours a week all year-round through high school and did well academically. </p>
<p>For any athletes on JHU campus or any JHU students, do you think the workload would be too overwhelming when matched with a sport? I plan on majoring in Classics and going Pre-med.</p>
<p>My roommate and some of my friends are on Varsity Sports here and they are fine. In fact, my suite mate is a BME lax player and he still manages to do well in class and have time to relax. As long you you realize that there will be times where you really can’t relax much due to your sport’s busy season and heavy work loads (some weeks it’s light, other weeks fairly heavy), you’ll be fine.</p>
<p>My son is on the (mens) fencing team and a STEM double major. While he has been busy at times (last semester was the worst due to the heavy class load he took on), it really has not been a problem. In fact, he enjoys the break from school work to work out 2hr/day. He’s not a partier at all though so I think that helps with time management.</p>
<p>One really nice thing about the northeast is that there is a lot of fencing teams within short distance (2hrs to Philadelphia where they made 3 trips this year, I think) so day trips are doable. There are overnight trips (to Duke and Boston this year) but I think mostly day trips so that’s good. From Chicago, you really have to travel far to get high level fencing competition. </p>
<p>The women’s team seems to be very close and a good group of kids. The coach is great too. I’m very happy to have my son at JHU both academically and fencing-wise.</p>
<p>Having said that, you should know that NW fencing team is better than JHU talent wise. They have 5 going to NCAA nationals this year (2E,2F,1S) while JHU has none. So if high level fencing is what you want, NW would be better. If you want to have fun with fencing, then JHU is what you want. JHU does fence Div 1 teams so you will come up against top fencers some during the course of the year.</p>
<p>You should definitely plan on visiting in April to get a good feel for the place if you haven’t already been. I think most people are pleasantly surprised by both the feel of the place and the campus.</p>
<p>Ah, thank you so much ihs76! I am not looking for intense practice that will take me to the olympics, so that sounds awesome. I really love JHU and continuing my athletic career into college would be fantastic, so I hope it’ll all come together and work out for me!</p>
<p>Also, this is random… but do you know what the maximum number of practice hours is? I know for Div I it’s 20 hours/week and 4 hours/day, but I was wondering if Div III is different. I tried googling it but I didn’t find any clear answer.</p>
and a STEM double major. While he has been busy at times (last semester was the worst due to the heavy class load he took on), it really has not been a problem. In fact, he enjoys the break from school work to work out 2hr/day. He’s not a partier at all though so I think that helps with time management.</p>