Hello! I’m still trying to get a realistic sense of what daily life at UChicago is like. What does the average week look like in terms of classes? Are most people in the classroom 5 days a week or can you schedule “off” days? If any current students or alumna have schedules that they wouldn’t mind sharing that would be real helpful.
Real tired of that 35h/week high school grind. Thank you!!
Most classes meet 3hr/week, either 1hr MWF or 1.5hr TTh. There are some exceptions but that is the standard. So if 3-4 classes/quarter translates to 9-12 hr classes/week. Some Science classes have a lab in addition (3-4 hr/week in addition) and core Bio is 2 hrs 3xwk which includes a lab.
Most people will have classes 5 days a week, 1-3hr/day. Classes start at 8.30 and are spread through the day. DD likes to have 2 classes MWF and 2 on TTh, starting no earlier than 10.30 
While it’s common for introductory courses to have M-W-F schedules, in many fields Friday classes are rare, especially as you get more advanced. My kids had lots of quarters with no Friday classes, but not their first years.
College simply isn’t like high school in this respect. There may be outliers, like West Point, but at most colleges you are likely to have under four hours of class on your heaviest day. Wherever you go, most of your time will be spent outside the classroom. And of course, unlike most high schools, in college you are free to come and go as you please between classes.
Every class meets ~3 hours a week. Every class usually assigns ~6 hours a week of hw (in p-sets/readings/routine work, etc.). From 4th - 8th week (sometimes as late as 10th or as early as 3rd), the amount of work you have will randomly spike because you’ll have to study for midterms and you’ll have to finish papers. 3rd/4th year a large amount of your time may be devoted to thesis writing. Obviously some classes will have dramatically more work (on one end of the scale, some sections of core bio assign no routine homework, some heavy theory classes assign hundreds of pages a week, some math classes assign very long p-sets, etc.). You eventually learn to balance class difficulties.
How you divide it up is up to you. A week has 168 hours. Assuming you are taking 4 classes and sleep 9 hours, you should have about 9 hours left over every day to fill with socializing/eating/RSOs/relaxing, etc.
And yes, you can easily schedule off days. If you’re really clever about it you could end up with classes just Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday and have a 4 day weekend every week
Not sure if this was mentioned but in the required first year Humanities sequence you will also have a couple of writing tutorials to attend. Also, if you place into Calc. 130’s you will have M-W-F class (50 min. each) and then on Tues. - Thurs. will be tutorial for up to 90 minutes each for homework help, weekly quizzes and such. My first-year daughter told me that she’d basically show up, take the quiz or hand in her assignment and then leave unless she needed extra help on something. Phy. Sci. and Bio sections will have a corresponding lab. For Core Biology (which is a pretty standard non-major starter-class in the Biology Core sequence) the labs are built into the overall class time so the weekly contact time seems to be six hours (two hours each on M-W-F). FL may also be scheduled for more than three hours per week depending on what you are taking - perhaps that includes lab or tutorial. Note these are all Core courses.
My D has been doing her Math and Science in the mornings and her Hum and Sosc. in the afternoons. That leaves her Fridays open pretty much from the noon hour onwards.
It was true when I was in college, and I’m sure it’s still true now: If you are a professor teaching a course, and you want to make certain that far fewer than the maximum number of students enroll, and that all students who do enroll have a very substantial interest in the subject matter . . . you schedule class hours on Friday afternoon. Provided, of course, that you are willing to show up on Friday afternoons to teach it.
In other words, it’s very rare not to have Friday afternoons free in college. (“Free” meaning “free from class time,” not necessarily “free from work you ought to be doing.” Of course.)