<p>hey, I heard all the hype that Georgia Tech is Uber high workload. What is the truth to this? Specifically:</p>
<p>a.) How many hours a day does a focused student spend a day doing schoolwork?</p>
<p>b.) How does the workload compare to other top engineering schools, such as CMU, MIT, Cornell, and Caltech?</p>
<p>a) It depends on the student, the course load the student is taking, and the time of the semester. I didn’t think it was that bad. One thing I noticed was that most students that claimed to “not have enough time” spent much of their day watching TV or playing video games. It’s not that they didn’t have time, they just didn’t know how to plan and prioritize.</p>
<p>b) From my experience at other schools, it’s about the same at most top engineering schools. The difference is that Tech admits more students on the “lower end” that are less likely to be able to handle the workload (thus more complaints from GT than MIT for the same workload).</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is such a true statement. People that claim to “have no time” generally are just extremely poor at using their time wisely.</p>
<p>I agree with G.P.Burdell that “it depends on the student, the course load…, and the time of the semester.”</p>
<p>For example, I thought one of my suitemates last year was a total idiot. It turns out that I seriously underestimated him; I mistook his near-complete inability to think logically for stupidity. He’s not stupid, not by a long shot. He took six classes (twenty hours) last semester, including some fairly difficult classes - Physics II, Probability & Statistics, and Combinatorics, to name three. He got five A’s and one C, which gave him a 3.7 for the semester. Now, I didn’t spend all day with him, so I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think I ever saw him study more than a few hours a week, even during “dead week.”</p>
<p>Of course, not everyone is like that. My roommate from freshman year, on the other hand, also barely studied and finished his first year with a ~2.3.</p>
<p>But you asked about a focused student. Another of my suitemates should fit your bill. After two years at Tech, he still has a 4.0, and he’s a ChemE. I actually see him study regularly. I would estimate that he studies at least 14 hours a week, and that’s probably an underestimate. He himself said that the time he spends studying every week is equal to, and I quote, “however long it takes me to do the reading plus five hours.” (If you don’t know him, that is a bit misleading because he is a very slow reader. And by very slow, I mean, VERY SLOW. It took him a month to read The Great Gatsby, and he was reading for an hour every day in the lounge during that month.)</p>