<p>I'm currently taking 6 AP classes at my high school. I'm studying and doing homework 5 hours a day, and that's on a good day. How different is college? Will it be harder in my case? Would you say that my current schedule is preparing me for college well?</p>
<p>Depends on where you’re going and what your major is. </p>
<p>For instance, an acquaintance of mine originally transferred to UCLA as a Psychology major. He attended for the first quarter/semester or whatever, hated having to read and write so much, and left after that quarter/semester to go back to CC and take Physics & Math classes and enrolled as an engineering major where I am (Cal Poly Pomona). It depends on what you see worth your time. You could be at a difficult institution and doing work you don’t like or be at a difficult institution for engineering and love putting in the hours of studying for something you see worth your time. Replace engineering & math throughout this with whatever major you have in mind. </p>
<p>I will say that it entirely depends on your school, your major, and most of all you. If you’re smart as a whip in your major then of course you’re not going to have to study as hard as others, but you will still have to study unless you have a photographic memory. It is insanely difficult one would think to get through engineering or mathematics without having to lift a finger.</p>
<p>For me, AP classes were the difficulty of freshman community college classes. You hit your junior and senior classes and your level of preparedness will be entirely on your previous years building up to that point.</p>
<p>It completely depends on your major and the classes you take. I went to a pretty tough high school and am now a physics major in college. I feel that the amount of work I had in high school is very similar to the amount in college, but several other things have changed. I have had barely any busywork in college. Instead of doing twenty versions of same problem rewritten five different ways with different numbers for a class like AP Chemistry in high school, I now have one problem set a week or so for each science class that has at most 10 problems which mostly all require a lot of work. For this reason, I actually really enjoy my work in college, which I did not in high school.
The other thing is that you have much more control over your schedule, so for me I feel like even though I spend the same amount of time on homework as I did in high school, depending on the week, I sometimes have more free time. One thing however, is that midterms and finals are much more stressful in college because they are a much larger portion of your grade.</p>
<p>I’m a Junior in Comp Sci with 3.8 gpa; College is pretty easy for me, if you put the time in with regard to studying you should be fine. If you spend your time trying to get laid and party, college can be pretty challenging. Stay focused.</p>
<p>thanks everybody! I’m sort of understanding the differences now. I plan on majoring in math or perhaps physics. Would the first two years be harder than the last two years? I feel like I wouldn’t enjoy completing my general ed reqs the first two years.</p>
<p>Likely, you’ll have more homework and it will be harder, but since you’re only in class on average 3 hours a day, you should net out more free time. In a weird way it’s harder yet easier because of having more time and making your own schedule and having no family commitments. (Except for senior year when job pressure kicks in.)</p>
<p>jdroid: For anything STEM, I’d suggest spreading out humanities classes, so you don’t have them all at the same time. Take maybe one per semester and it’ll help balance out the math and physics and labs.</p>
<p>As for the original question, totally depends on major, school, and classes.</p>
<p>Well, let’s see. It’s a step up so far, but it isn’t that much harder. There’s just more studying to be done and attention to detail. If you have a good handle on everything you did in the last two years, you should be well-prepared. Sometimes they try to scare you, though. Like in my Calc II summer class the first day she told everyone “If you did not get an A in Calc I you will not pass and you will fail miserably. You might barely be able to get by if you had a B. Leave now or show me your transcript.” Not sure whether this made people leave or not but she was also wearing a t-shirt that said MIT alumni. And then recently in my proofs class…“50% of math majors drop out after this course.” In my Linear Algebra class the teacher was notoriously known for being hard (at community college). I think only about 9 of us were left out of 35 by the end of the semester. I can actually tell you where all these people ended up going cause we all banded together to pass, haha…1 MIT, 1 Stanford, 3 Berkeley, 1 CSUN, 1 UCLA, 2 Cal Poly Pomona.</p>
<p>Just don’t get weeded out. You’ll know if the math or physics major isn’t for you.</p>
<p>Don’t let people scare you with horror stories about how difficult a math or physics major is going to be. Do be prepared for a stressful - not hard but stressful - major. </p>
<p>Proof-based math problems (in your upper-level coursework) have the property that you’ll either get what’s going on or that you’ll be completely lost. There’s no in-between, no partial progress, no busy work. Math assignments are unlike history papers where with some effort you can always write something coherent, and unlike physics labs where you can follow protocol even if you don’t understand the underlying theory. Be prepared to spend a lot of time feeling completely lost in your classes. That’s a normal part of being a math major.</p>
<p>What distinguishes the successful math majors from the students who drop the major is how they react to that kind of stress: do you sit down, read through the last 3 chapters again, work through an example, talk to classmates and then go to office hours if necessary? Or do you get discouraged and give up?</p>
<p>(Disclaimer: I can’t speak for all of the math majors out there. At least this experience holds true for me. I often felt lost in my classes as an undergraduate, yet I did well enough to be a math PhD student at Stanford now. Most of my classmates at Stanford would agree with me on the ‘stressful’ and ‘feeling’ lost parts, and these were some of the highest-performing undergraduate math majors in the country!)</p>