Hi all! It’s looking extremely likely that I’ll be taking 2 or 3 courses during a 6-week session this summer in order to cut a year off my degree. I’m just looking for advice on summer courses: how many have you taken at one time without getting burned out, how do you handle the faster pace, have you needed to alter your typical study habits, etc.
I’m really nervous about it, but really excited to save a year of time if it all works out!
I took 3 courses last summer. I took Intro to Philosophy, American Politics and Government, and Western Civilization from 1600. These were all general education requirements for me (I’m a physics major), and weren’t too terribly difficult. They all had a fairly sizable writing component, so that took up some time. I had to spend more time reading than I would have during a regular semester because of the faster pace, but it wasn’t really any more difficult than a regular semester in my opinion. The summer before last I took Trigonometry and also Intro to Communications. Taking trig in the summer involved considerably more time per day spent studying, but the nature of the class requires more study time than many other classes even during a regular semester, so that was to be expected.
Thanks! Mine will probably be a music class for my arts requirement, an upper-level human development course, and an upper-level human development, psych, or anthro course. So I’m expecting the first to be pretty easy, and the others to be challenging but interesting!
I took both US History 1 and US History 2 last summer for the history ge requirement, while serving as a senator for student government and training 3 hours a day for swim. It was a fair amount of work with everything I had going on, but it was do able as long as I managed my time.
I would suggest only taking nonmajor required classes since it will be a lot of information packed into a short amount of time, and be prepared to manage your time well.
I took my last gen chem class over the first 6 week summer session last summer. I actually really liked the pacing of it, but the 5 hour labs each week were really tiring. I took a random 3 unit (chem was 5 units) astronomy class with chem just to have units for financial aid, and because it sounded interesting. That one ended up being pretty much no work. Overall, no regrets.
I say either take only non-major classes, or only take one major related class at a time. And hit the ground running; stay ahead on readings and assignments if at all possible.
Remember that a regular course is 15 weeks. How long is each summer course? I would try not to take more than one at a time, two at the most.