People keep saying that UChicago students have hard workloads, that they’re stressed, etc, y’know. What exactly does this mean? Are there a lot of time-consuming assignments? Are classes graded more rigorously than one would expect? Or is it just that there’s a lot of studying necessary to learn?
Yes. You are given hundreds of pages of dense reading to read a week, p-sets with problems that can take up to an hour each, and are expected to spend huge chunks of time completing labs and essays.
Yes. Today I had a writing TA rave about a paper he gave me a B+ on. Most classes give out As sparingly and you readjust your expectations of what a good grade is.
Yes. Every class goes by fast, trying to squeeze a semester’s worth of material into a quarter, and you are expected to pick it up, retain it, and learn the material to a very deep level. For most people, that means you must study a lot.
@theskittlebug @HydeSnark Lol, yeah, the students who can’t cut it go to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown etc
Just kidding. I do think, they expect you to work hard. It is academically rigorous, which is the way all good schools should be, but this is where the school culture comes in. Some schools attract many kids that want to spend more time exploring extra curricular activities and non academic interests, like at Harvard and Yale for e.g. and that does affect the overall culture of the University even though at every top school you will find kids who work very hard and are very academically oriented.
Chicago used to attract many many of the “academically oriented kids”, specially before the “Common App” days, but since it has started its rapid rise in the rankings, I think the student body is slowly changing. I am not sure how long that “predominantly academic culture” will hold sway at the University. I sure hope it does. Just as we need universities like Harvard, Yale etc for kids who are “social butterflies”, we also need Universities like Chicago, Columbia, Cooper Union for kids who would rather focus predominantly on academics.
Again a Student can be one type and thrive at the other kind of University. It will just require more determined effort on the student’s part.
Based on what I hear from parents of current students (and the students themselves), as well as from others who are part of the University of Chicago community, there is no meaningful diminution of the predominantly academic culture.
The current students may be more social, on average, than students 10 or 20 years ago, but there were always plenty of students who were social without destroying the culture of the university. Chicago’s reputation for anti-social students came from maybe having 10% of the undergraduate student body consisting of people who were challenged socially, while at a place like Harvard it might have been 4% or 5%. The academic character of the university was not dependent on that. The current students may also have more engagement with extracurricular activities, on average, but there were always plenty of students who were engaged in extracurricular activities, too.
@JHS and @VeryLuckParent : I am trying to understand where the HYP stereotypes come from in terms of students being overly indulged with ECs (I mean, at one of these 3, students are basically volunteering for a senior project requirement). I know they have really good on campus organizations and traditions, but I would not diminish how academically focused they are . I found this article for example:http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/9/4/College-introduces-LS50-course/
They had 125 students attempt to “volunteer” for a biology course that is likely more rigorous than upperlevel biochemistry courses at some other elites not in their tier (I consider Chicago in the same tier academically but some of these schools who have recently achieved the same or very similar score ranges as HYPM could not get that many volunteers for a course at that level if someone told them their school would lose accredidation if they didn’t). The fact is even many H students are indeed ambitious “nerds”(using in good way here) that want to learn at the highest level possible.
I think how academically oriented a school is seems to depend on how challenging the courses are versus the students that matriculate. The super elite schools that do well with this like Chicago, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and MIT tend to feel more academic than other “peers”, even if they have wonderful EC’s and campus traditions. This is primarily because they’ve found a way to academically cater to even their most talented students (They really try hard to prevent the students who show higher levels of experience and talent than their SAT/GPAs already indicate, from being bored academically. And this evident regardless of what folks think about the grading patterns at such schools). Not only that, but as the article suggests, they draw students willing to be challenged at a higher than normal level.
In reality, I think the true social butterfly schools are places like Georgetown, Vanderbilt, Duke, Stanford, and Penn. Academically excellent but the social and academic vibes there are completely different (and except for maybe Stanford, they tend to sell this difference in social vibe and campus life perhaps more than academic strengths). They don’t necessarily draw in droves of freshmen who would sign up for that class if they didn’t have to: http://www.ls50.net/wp/
I mean, take a look at that course. It would be a struggle to draw a few students via “invite” (as in students damned sure aren’t applying to it) at true social butterfly schools (and even some of the more academically oriented schools outside of that very top tier). I would not underestimate how academic Chicago’s peers are. I view @JHS’s assessment as more representative of the likely truth that they are more alike than different in terms of that.
I’ve probably said this here before, but (a) any student who wants it can get a mind-blowingly good education (no matter how good the mind) at Harvard or Princeton (I can’t vouch for Yale or Stanford) and (b) that’s not what most undergrads are there for (or the basis on which they were selected).
By contrast, the HS students who are attracted to U of C seem primarily drawn by its academic intensity – and U of C clearly has an admissions process that is designed to identify those kinds of kids.
So, in the end, what it comes down to for an academically-oriented kid choosing between an HYPS and U of C is the extent to which you care about your cohort and what the dominant undergraduate culture is. (Of course, sometimes, it may also come down to a comparison of faculty/resources in a particular major.)
Look, I try to avoid the stereotype that HYPS are not academically focused, although sometimes a little stereotyping is useful when trying to draw distinctions. @bernie12 's characterization of Penn, Vanderbilt, Stanford et al. as “social butterfly” schools is completely exaggerated and insulting, and not at all accurate, but it does refer to a difference between them and HYP that is true to a degree. It’s just a much smaller degree than the rhetoric implies.
The Yale I attended 40 years ago was a very academic place. A fond memory is attending a blow-out party in my college one winter. The outgoing captain of the football team, BMOC, was sitting on a couch in the middle of the room with a number of teammates and secret-society friends. Everyone was – as they said long before may day – four sheets to the wind. The ex-captain was earnestly explaining what he was trying to do in his senior thesis on pre-Socratic philosophy, and all of these other jock/social types were giving him real critique, challenging him, suggesting collateral approaches. It was true that if you were a Daily News editor, you pretty much had to give up on going to class regularly (and on taking classes that required your presence), and only about half the Wiffenpoofs graduated on time. (Now I think it’s a lot less than half.) But on the whole, the place was infused with academics. People did things like read each other’s course materials and form study groups to look at topics that courses weren’t covering. Lunch conversation tended to be about the morning’s lecture in popular courses. Most people had close relationships with at least one or two faculty members.
It was, in fact, a lot like the UChicago my kids attended. It felt a little more connected to the corridors of power in the real world, while Chicago was somewhat more ivory-towerish. Because of the core, Chicago students found it easier to talk seriously about ideas to classmates they didn’t know well, but it also meant that they had to put up with some classes they didn’t enjoy much. And. yes, people were less committed to extracurriculars, even those running the organizations. (And the organizations lacked a tradition of independence from the university administration, which affected things quite a bit.)
I think the differences between Chicago and its peers are a combination of fairly subtle things. For example, at Chicago and, I believe, at Yale, people tend to want to be broad; at Harvard, I think more people look for some niche they can dominate. There’s a lot more visible privilege at HYPS than at Chicago; that goes along with the closer-connection-to-power thing. And it does make a difference that at HYPS, almost everyone lives on campus all four years (although that seems to be weakening some at Yale), whereas at Chicago at any moment half the students are diffused somewhat in the surrounding community. That means they do more in the city, but a little less (only a little) focused on the university.
From the same place most stereotypes come from. Anecdotal evidence gathered by individuals who are not doing ** double blind controlled studies**. The same place the ** Where fun goes to die** stereotype comes from about UChicago.
As I said, you can get a terrific and serious education at most good schools. I don’t for a moment want to imply that somehow academic pursuits at UChicago are better than Harvard or Yale (at least not yet, see my comments below). That would be silly. But schools have culture and draw certain kinds of students, and I feel that Harvard and Yale tend to draw kids who value EC’s as much if not more than academics to a greater extent than UChicago does.
Yale and Harvard have also become increasingly beholden to politically correct viewpoints and this will affect class discussions and learning specially in the Humanities and Social Science classes. For the moment the administration is rebuffing attempts to let this trend proliferate at UChicago.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/the-new-activism-of-liberal-arts-colleges
If this trend continues, academics will certainly suffer at schools that embrace this philosophy and my educated guess based on what I am seeing in the press, is that right now Harvard and Yale are closer to Oberlin in their philosophy than UChicago is.
@JHS : You find that insulting? Really? These schools and their students often pride themselves on this reputation of being more socially vibrant and laid back than other schools they compare themselves to. Some are indeed likely also more academically laid back or feel less stressful than some of the other elite schools including Chicago, HYPM. Stanford is academically rigorous but is also known for a grade inflation that rivals top Ivy Leagues and has a notorious reputation for a pressure to constantly be and look happy…leading to the so called “Duck Syndrome”…and it appears to have caught on at Duke. Can they possess somme characteristics of the seemingly more “nerdy” schools to some degree, yes. But I am just saying that there are certainly differences that students can feel out. Some gravitate toward (TONS actually), and some don’t. The students at these schools which are typically considered among the happiest do not seem particularly insulted. Those schools ultimately have a much more “balanced” feel than others. I would say that “most” of them maintain a high level of academic rigor overall while still maintaining or at least portraying that balance, but I wouldn’t say that overall, they are attracting 125 students per class that would sign up for an LS50 level course except for maybe Stanford. The academic intensity of such student bodies cannot be written off as just the same as the others.
@VeryLuckyParent : If the only calibration point is Chicago, then I see your point, but again I would never underestimate the academic orientation of many of the students and how that orientation actually often bleeds over into the types of popular and well-known ECs you see at such schools.