<p>Hi, I just have a few questions. I’ll be a freshman this coming fall.</p>
<li><p>Does anyone have any experience taking classes at another campus? How much of a pain is it? I am (mildly) interested in learning a language that Amherst doesn’t offer – and I like to take more than 4 courses, so I was wondering if it would be managable to take 4 Amherst courses and 1 course from maybe U-Mass or Smith. (/Does anyone have any experience taking more than 4 classes – I obviously would not do this first semester)</p></li>
<li><p>How difficult is it to make freshman sports teams? I have played a sport in H.S. but quit after Sophomore year because I was bored of it. I would have probably made varsity either Soph or Jun. year but I am obviously a lot worse now – how serious are the freshman teams (girls) ? </p></li>
<li><p>I forget my third question… hmm … will post if I remember</p></li>
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<li><p>Taking classes at other schools can be a pain, but it’s usually worth it if you’re taking the right class. Also, it depends what school you’re taking it at. UMass and Hampshire are each about 10 minutes away on the bus, but Smith can be up to an hour. In addition, the other schools’ class start and end times don’t alway match up with Amherst’s, so an hour-long class could theoretically take a 3-hour chunk out of your day if it doesn’t start on the hour. For that reason only, it’s difficult to take five classes when one is at another college. When I’ve taken five classes, I’ve had approximately 24 hours of class each week, and adding travel time, etc. would have killed me. Also, I wouldn’t want to advise taking five classes unless you absolutely have to. I expected that it would not be so different than taking four, but maybe with a lot of work around finals and midterms. Instead, it is mentally and physically exhausting–not really in the sense that the work is overwhelming, but just that there is always more work to be done and you can’t take a break without it looming over you.</p></li>
<li><p>Sports here aren’t like in high school with freshman, JV, and varsity. There are varsity sports teams, those which recruit athletes and are part of the NCAA. Then we have club teams, which compete with other schools like varsity teams, but aren’t part of the NCAA or anything. Club teams generally accept anyone, including complete beginners, and so usually have sort of division by skill. Also, there are intramural sports, like softball, basketball, soccer, volleyball, etc., which are really casual and are generally just groups of friends playing together.</p></li>
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<p>I attend Smith, but I’ve taken econ classes at Amherst. The time commitment is huge though, so you definitely need to take that into consideration when signing up for stuff. My class was 1 hr 20 minutes, but since I had to take the bus at peak traffic times, I would spend about 40 minutes going there and the ride back ranges from 60-75 minutes. I didn’t really mind since the class was great, I got off campus, I met new people, etc., but when I do it again, I plan to take two classes at Amherst back-to-back so that I get the most out of the trip there.</p>
<p>Hours of work for the econ major? Depends a lot on your skill with math. If you have always excelled pretty easily in algebra and calculus, it should really be no sweat. I’ve probably averaged up to 3 hours per week of homework for my econ classes. The department has some great profs, but they get inundated with jocks and rich kids who want finance jobs, so it kind of dumbs a lot of material down. If you’re interested in econ grad school, you can get get great preparation and challenging, coursework by taking good core math classes, like linear algebra and analysis, along with intermediate and multivar. calc.</p>
<p>It’s interesting that you mention Northwestern, because, to be honest, they have a pretty killer econ department (Aviv Nevo!). You have a tough choice. Personally I think Amherst would be better for your undergrad experience, but I don’t know too much about life at Northwestern. I’ve been happy with Amherst though! Good luck.</p>
<p>Oh, I’m talking about transportation time. From my personal experience, there really isn’t a difference in academics between Amherst and Smith.</p>
<p>I couldn’t give you a generalization of how hard an Amherst econ major works (since it will really depend on the person), but my econ course required class twice a week. We’d have maybe a chapter in the textbook plus 3-4 other things to read. Quizzes are frequent, and there were two midterms. Problem sets (of which there were 8) could be lengthy, so I’d say I spent about 6-10 hours per week on just that class.</p>