UChicago first-year taking your questions!

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
41

@Lea111

  1. https://evaluations.uchicago.edu/ (looks like [url=<a href=“https://s24.postimg.org/hqj1esbx1/0p_PEr9g.png%5Dthis%5B/url”>https://s24.postimg.org/hqj1esbx1/0p_PEr9g.png]this[/url] when you log in - short answer, yes)

  2. You list 8 classes in order of preference. An algorithm gives most people the classes they need/want. Then the people who don’t deal with various systems for getting into a class you didn’t get into. For most people, there’s space and they can just add it to their schedule. If there isn’t space, there’s usually some sort of waitlist feature. Most people get the classes they want. The new system is better than the old one. People generally don’t have to fight for their classes, though there are some that are harder to get, if you really really want it you usually can. I got into a very popular and totally full art class my first year by explaining why I really wanted to take that class to the professor. Someone dropped because of schedule conflicts and I was given the class.

I know at some schools people fight it out to get into the classes they need. I have not heard of that happening here.

And yes you get preference if you need it for various reasons (the core, your major, etc.)

42

Thanks HydeSnark - these are great.

More questions, possibly too specialized, but you never know who is reading:

(1) Does a 5 on AP Stat exam, which gives you credit for a stat class that is required for Psychology majors, mean you have what you need to major in Psychology?

(2) It’s not clear to me whether Core Biology is required for Psychology majors (by being a prerequisite to required classes). If not, is it reasonably possible to major in Psychology without taking Core Biology or a harder biology class?

43

@Lea111

  1. There’s a footnote on the summary of requirements:

“Examination Credit for PSYC 20100 Psychological Statistics or STAT 22000 Statistical Methods and Applications will not count toward the requirements for the major. Students with credit for PSYC 20100 or STAT 22000 should replace that requirement with a higher level Statistics course or an additional psychology elective.”

It looks like you can skip right to Psychological Research Methods but you don’t get credit for the class so you need to take another class to make up for it. I think. Ask your advisor if you come.

  1. It looks like you can major in it while avoiding high level bio classes but I wonder if that’s such a good idea, they are pretty close fields. In any case, you’ll have to take bio of some sort for the core. Talk to your advisor.
44

Thanks. Sorry, I was very unclear. I know that a 5 on AP Stat will meet the Psychology department’s requirement. I was just wondering if any Psych majors (or their friends) have felt that having no actual college statistics was okay. Would forgoing the AP credit and taking the class be worthwhile, or a waste of time (such that it would be better to take an additional psychology elective, many of which look interesting). Same issue for core or higher biology; even if you CAN get out of taking it, is that a good idea, in terms of the classes you’ll be taking for psychology major? At many very selective liberal arts colleges, biology is not needed for a psychology major at all. But it looks to me like Chicago’s version may be more tilted toward biopsychology. This would be for a student who is likely to study psychology out of interest and/or perhaps in preparation for a K-12 teaching career, almost certainly not for graduate level psychology study, so that’s why I’m wondering about how necessary biology is, in order to make sense of the classes needed for a psychology major per se. I’ve read such bad things about core biology on CC - time-consuming, not hard but not very useful. At the same time, she might not want to completely rule out a possible double major in psychology. Will probably find a psychology major on PSAC to ask, though if any with psychology class experience reads this, feel free to give your thoughts.

45

What do y’all think about your advisors? This is one of the things I unfortunately hear from current students - many - not all - say that advising, at least first-year advising, is not good. Having been put into a first year class for physics majors (without having taking AP Physics or AP Calculus in high school) a very theoretical “fantasy” math class, then forced to drop down to Calc 2 two weeks into the school year, and a second semester French class, even though I’d had only 6 weeks of intensive French at a state school - in other words, having been allowed to take the hardest classes I placed into, without regard to my real preparation, at a school then ranked in the top two for physics and math - I am really wary about poor 1st year advising for my kid and its possible long-term bad effects. What do most students say about their advisors? Is it very hit or miss?

46

@Lea111 If you read the course catalog, it’s clear that if you have a 5 on the Statistics AP you can satisfy the introductory statistics requirement for a Psychology major without taking another statistics course. On the other hand, based on my children’s experience I would suggest that students at the University of Chicago tend to develop much more of an interest in statistics once they are there than they thought they had when they were in high school. I don’t know anyone who majored in Psychology, but most of the social science majors I have met took more than one statistics-oriented course, whether or not they had to.

Rather than re-taking introductory Statistics, it may make sense for your daughter to take a next-level Statistics course (or statistics-oriented Psych course) rather than any old extra Psychology elective. But she doesn’t need to make a decision on that for 2-3 years. Why not wait and see what she thinks then? For all you know, she’ll be majoring in something entirely different.

It’s also possible (in theory) to major in Psychology without taking either Core Biology or one of the actual introductory Biology sequences. There is no specific Biology requirement for a Psychology major. The Core requires two quarters of Biology classes, but there are essentially four ways to meet that requirement (and many more if you start to factor in AP credit): (1) Take one quarter of Core Biology (that’s all there is of it) and one Biology Topics seminar, (2) take a regular introductory Biology sequence, the first two quarters of which will satisfy the Core, (3) take the Biology department’s pre-med sequence for non-science majors, or (4) take one of four additional two-quarter Biology sequences for non-majors that satisfy the Core requirement. As I understand it, each of the first three is vastly more popular than the fourth option, but the fourth option exists. The special sequences focus, respectively, on pharmacology, nutrition, modeling, and evolution and whales (the last taught only as part of an integrated curriculum for a quarter in residence at the Woods Hole marine research facility). Any of those four sequences satisfies the Core requirement, and thus satisfy the Psychology requirement as well.

My children’s experience (now somewhat outdated) was that Core Biology was useless but not difficult at all. My daughter, and all her friends who took Core Bio, thought the class should be eliminated and everyone required to take the same bio courses as science majors or pre-meds . . . but given the option to work less, learn less, and not to have to compete with science majors and pre-meds for space on the curve, they took it. The Bio Topics courses tended to be fun and interesting, and were very popular. Some people who took regular Bio courses took a Topics course as an elective because they were sexy and enjoyable.

Advising: My children’s experience (again, now somewhat outdated) was that the quality of advising, especially outside their majors, was very mixed. Some kids had great advisors and had continuity with the same advisor for 3-4 years. In some cases, the advisor-student relationship was really valuable, as when one advisor started coaching a student towards successful Truman and Rhodes applications starting in her second year. My daughter had a new advisor every year, and thought they were useless. The advisor’s main function was to make certain she met her Core requirements, and she was perfectly capable of figuring that out herself. She got bad or misleading advice on a couple of specific things that weren’t that important, but didn’t make her feel like she ought to invest more in her relationship with her advisors. My son started out as a pre-med, and so he had a pre-med advisor for his first two years, and mostly what the guy did was to discourage him. The advisor wasn’t wrong, but he wasn’t constructive, either. In the end, my kids’ relationships with their non-departmental advisors was 10 minutes of bureaucracy per quarter – nothing valuable, but no big deal, either.

47

Thanks, @JHS. I’ve read many, many of your posts over the last year (very useful!), and you’re probably one of the ones I’ve read the info on Core Biology from.

It’s true that the decision about statistics doesn’t have to be made for a while. She’s already got the AP credit anyway, so it’s not like she has to decide whether to take the AP exam.

Biology is different. She’s hoping to take one particularly time-consuming but very valuable class first year, as well as get heavily involved in (at least one) extracurricular activity, so doesn’t need to take any other classes that are time drains, esp classes where you don’t actually learn much - had plenty of that kind of class in high school!

I guess she’ll have to decide whether to take Core Biology + biology elective, hopefully enjoying the second even if the first is not so useful, is time-consuming, and is boring - or take that metabolism sequence, which some people seem to say is interesting and useful, though not tough. (Luckily, she doesn’t care what other people think about her choices - if she did, she’d be going to Yale, not to a school that many around here think is a Chicago community college!) But if Core Biology is actually useful for anything - including understanding psychology classes (even if she doesn’t major or double major in psychology, she’s likely to take psychology classes, I’m guessing), that would be a big thumb on the scale for going ahead and taking Core Biology.

Also, she had a terrible 9th grade biology class - she and another bright student were all the time politely correcting the teacher, who frequently misquoted the textbook and ranted about the value of water all the time like the guy in Dr. Strangelove - her teacher was forced to resign the next year for cheating on standardized tests. Her non-AP chemistry class also was not very good. So she probably isn’t ready for an even tougher biology class. Her school is just weak in science over all. Only one student from her school taking AP Biology got a 5 last year, and she herself did NOT take AP Biology, just the 9th grade biology with the Dr. Strangelove teacher.

So Core Biology would be the highest she would think about trying. Especially since she already has her “very hard but useful” (for her) class in mind, and it’s not science or math.

As I’m thinking aloud, I wonder if maybe Core Biology would actually be right for her, given that she hasn’t had good regular high school biology or chemistry? (Her school is very weak in science over all, esp biology and chemistry.) Maybe other Chicago student think it isn’t useful because it’s redundant of better high school biology courses - is that possible? Or is it really just a waste of time for everyone?

Since she’ll have to take either biological sciences core or physical sciences core her first year, I thought it would be helpful to figure out whether Core Biology would be worth it. It would be a shame if she took, say, that metabolism sequence or another bio sequence to meet the core requirement, and then ended up needing to take harder biology or wishing she had done so, in order to understand her psychology classes.

48

I honestly think that you are over-thinking things.

My daughter and her friends thought Core Biology was useless because it was a one-quarter survey course covering material that “real” STEM students 3-5 five quarters on. By necessity, it was superficial, and not very rigorous. They didn’t think it was time-consuming, or even terribly boring – it moved fast and touched on a lot of areas; the idea was to help non-science students appreciate what scientists do, without really making them do it. I’m sure it would help someone understand Psychology courses with a biology element. It probably wouldn’t be enough if you wanted to go heavily into something like cognitive neuroscience. (If you were doing that, you sure would want to take math and statistics more advanced than AP Stats, too.)

If your daughter wants to take a real Biology sequence, she shouldn’t be afraid of it. It’s not inherently difficult – every day, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of college students (millions, more likely), most doubtless not as smart as she, are learning Biology perfectly well.

Why would she be in a rush to take Core Bio?

49

Re when to take core bio classes: Administration makes it seem like you should finish your core classes in first 2 years. She’ll only AP out of foreign language and probably both semesters of calculus, so that’s 13 core classes to take. Presumably she’ll need to take 6 or 7 for each of the first 2 years (though I’ve read about students not doing their “art” core class until later?). Some seem to say that you shouldn’t take hum and sosc at the same time, though that’s unclear to me; maybe it depends on the class. But it does seem to make sense to try to space the reading classes out and the science classes out, just for variety’s sake (?). So either 2 quarters of bio core 1st year or 2 quarters of physical science core 1st year, as I said above. Could be physical science first, no problem. But I don’t know how much flexibility in schedules kids have, and if she ends up needing to do bio the first year for some reason, it would be good to have a decision on this. And if bio is helpful for psych classes, it would make sense to take that before taking psych classes, which might be second year?

If the core bio isn’t time-consuming, maybe that would be just right for her. I just seen others saying “lots of time-consuming busy work” about the class. Maybe it depends on the teachers.

Her main interests are filmmaking, creative writing, theater, and teaching kids. So this sounds good: “the idea was to help non-science students appreciate what scientists do, without really making them do it.” She’s had 3 years of AP math, 2 years of AP physics. At the time she was deciding about applying to Chicago, she had hoped to AP out of physical science (had gotten a 5 on the practice exam), but now it looks like that isn’t going to happen. So 4 quarters of science for a humanities major - that’s fine, but might as well make the most of them, in terms of interest and value versus time they take. She doesn’t want dumb classes, but she doesn’t want hard-for-hardness’ sake classes either. And she really, really doesn’t want classes that waste her time. Because she has many things she wants to do, both classes and non-class things. (I read an alum review of Grinnell that said something like, “It’s frustrating, because you feel like you’re finally in a place with the most brilliant, interesting people, and yet because of the crushing workload, you don’t have time to spend with them.” That seemed so sad. It’s one thing to say that academics are the big thing; it’s another to say that they are the only thing. And intellectual life is not limited to for-credit classes. You might want to audit a class; you might want treat intellectual extracurriculars in very intellectual ways. You might want to really hone your writing, even if this means spending 15 hours a week on a class that others spend 5 hours on. But again, not if all your time is spent on for-credit classes. None of this cuts one way or the other on what bio class to take; just makes it more important not to waste classes on something not valuable.)

Funny, I told her that if you go to Chicago, at least you won’t have to hear anyone tell you “you’re overthinking things” any more. :smiley: Maybe this is less about overthinking (thinking is good) and more about overworrying and thus trying to overplan. This comes from the fact that what gets said about Chicago, even modern Chicago, is very conflicting. Some say you can get enough sleep (medically necessary in her case), have friendships, be very involved in extracurricular activities, and still take 4 classes in a quarter. Some make it seem like that’s impossible. Given my experience in college first year, we are recommending that she start slowly with classes and see how it goes; then she can increase class difficulty or number if things are working out okay. Given how bad the advising seems to be, it seems like it’s on us to figure out what’s a reasonable class schedule for a kid with her background and wishes. That’s what we’re trying to do. Am completely aware that the best laid plans may get all shot to hell anyway.

50

“If your daughter wants to take a real Biology sequence, she shouldn’t be afraid of it. It’s not inherently difficult – every day, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of college students (millions, more likely), most doubtless not as smart as she, are learning Biology perfectly well.” She doesn’t want to do that. She would have been happy to come to Chicago and take only the core of the core (i.e., not science or math), and enjoy talking about science with her science-y friends. She is also terrible at rote memorization. I didn’t take biology in college, so I don’t know what it’s like a school like Chicago or my Ivy League school - for my then boyfriend at a state school, it was a lot of memorization. This is one of the reasons DD took 2 years of AP Physics and no AP Biology (also weak high school teacher in biology). As far as whether it’s difficult, I also don’t know about that. I can say this. I was MUCH better at math than my boyfriend and I liked it better. But there’s no way I could have majored in math or physics at my university which was then ranked #2 in math, while my boyfriend, mostly for convenience of graduating quickly, did major in math at our state school. So I was just thinking that maybe a real biology sequence at Chicago might be harder and possibly more time-consuming than a biology sequence that hundreds of thousands or millions of students take. Obviously, each person has to decide how broad versus how deep she wants her education to be, and if a future English teacher wants to dabble in biology for biology majors, or a future filmmaker wants to dabble in biology for premeds, more power to them. DD’s not scared of science or math, but she doesn’t want such classes to prevent her from doing things she is more interested in. Possibly I am confusing first-year chemistry and biology classes anyway? (When DD went to visit Chicago, the young woman she ate lunch with, a former would-be chemistry major who had switched to humanities major, said, “Whatever you do, don’t take the chemistry class. And don’t take 4 classes a time if you want to have a life.”) Still, my guess would be that “real” biology sequences at Chicago would be harder than the biology sequences at many colleges and universities? No? Is that kind of thing just bravado on the part of Chicago biology majors and premeds?

51

“Administration makes it seem like you should finish your core classes in first 2 years.”

Yes for most of the Core courses. But it is not uncommon for a third-year to take three Civs via study abroad program. It is most likely (or required by some departments) to finish Hum core the first year. Then a student can spread Sosc and Civ over two years (second and third). A lot of people do not take two of three Core courses at the same year. So by the end of her second year a student should finish all Core courses (maybe except either Sosc or Civ).

52

A lot of science majors leave finishing their core until 3rd or even 4th year because of the heavy reading imparted by taking two humanities cores together (i.e. HUM and SOSC, SOSC and civ, etc.). It usually works out fine–that’s what I plan to do. But besides those most do try and finish all the other requirements (bio, art, etc) in their first 2 years.

53

@Lea111 Yeah I’ll +1 what @JHS says about advisors. I have been lucky to get a fantastic advisor. That isn’t the exception, but it isn’t the rule either.

54

How are first year advisors determined? Does it matter if you come in knowing what subject, or what area (e.g., humanities) you want to major in? (I am just full of questions, aren’t I?)

55

@Lea111 I think your general adviser is random, but my career adviser was given to me based on my potential major/interests (I’m a STEM person, so my career adviser is the director for UChicago UCISTEM program). So far my general adviser hasn’t been super helpful, but I can’t say that I don’t like her–it’s kinda neutral since I’ve only talked with her twice and once was a rushed register for classes time. My career adviser on the other hand I’ve only seen once but that one time was super super helpful–she helped me revise my resume and give me feedback on what to alter/add and she also told me about potential internships and fellowships that would be of interest to me, both this year and down the line my second and third years. Overall, I haven’t had a bad experience, but I’m sure it differs depending on who you talk to.

56

Are the evaluations for biology courses kept in a different place, or are there just none more recent than 2012?

57

Can someone please explain how choosing classes to fulfill the Core requirements works? Are ONLY the classes listed here: http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/thecollege/thecurriculum/#Core ones that goes towards fulfilling those requirements? Any advice for a first year student when it comes to picking classes (I heard that one shouldn’t take Civ as a first year). Also, is it better to read up on the classes that you want to take before first meeting with your adviser? And is it common to have no idea what’s going on in terms of choosing classes as a first year? Thanks in advanced!

58

@ScrnNme Yea the classes listed on that site are the ones that will fulfill the core. If you go to classes.uchicago.edu you can see what classes are offered each quarter. On the left there’s a menu where you can select only classes that will fulfill a certain core requirement–these are super helpful to plan out what classes you want to take each quarter.

All students take HUM their first year. I wouldn’t recommend taking two reading-intensive core classes (such as HUM & SOSC or HUM and CIV) unless your a humanities person and can handle a lot of reading. Your advisor will probably tell you to finish up the core as fast as possible but you don’t have to rush everything if you don’t think you can handle it–I know that I can’t do lots of classes with intense reading (I’m a STEM major) so I’m planning to spread my major core reqs (HUM, SOSC, and CIV) over three years. The thing with core classes is that when you register for classes, there’s an algorithm that puts you into classes that you rank online. Unlike all other classes where your precedence for a class is determined by descending year (ie. 4th>3rd>2nd>1st), for core classes, the order of precedence is 2nd year>1st>3rd>4th. So don’t leave your core till your 4th year or it will be really hard to get into classes you want (esp. art/music/drama…I’ve heard those are super hard to get into…guess I’ll have to wait and see how bidding goes for next quarter :p)

When you have your registration meeting with your advisor during O-week, you will be expected to come in with a list of classes you want to take and also alternates in case the classes/sections you want are full. If you’re not prepared your advisor will get mad and might make you go out and plan your quarter while he/she registers another student…So yes most definitely know exactly what classes you want to take and have back-up options as well. You have to plan out your schedule by yourself–make sure class times don’t overlap, make sure you have the required pre-reqs, etc. They don’t really hold your hand in this process–all your advisor will do is physically go and register you for classes (after your first quarter you’ll do this by yourself online). You will meet with your advisor twice before the registration meeting as a group so you can definitely ask questions there about classes. Read evaluations for the class/professor (you’ll get access to this once you get your cnet id and all that). Upperclassmen in your house are also great resources for asking about specific classes or teachers.

Registering for classes was probably the most stressful thing I did during O-week, so don’t worry if it’s intimidating at first! You’ll have meetings to walk through what will happen during your registration meeting and about classes. Also if I remember correctly there was an entire 4 hour info session during O-week dedicated to talking about all the different core options and requirements–I would highly recommend you attend that to know all of your options–I found it pretty helpful.