My son watched an admissions web chat hosted by Viterbi students. A viewer asked about their workload, and one student said he does about 6 hours of homework a week. None of the other students contradicted him. In fact, others talked about the free time they had for clubs and extracurricular activities. My son was incredulous that the workload for an engineering student could be that light. Would love to hear from Viterbi students and/or their parents about whether this has been accurate for you or not.
Doesn’t sound right, at least not for CS. The programming assignments in the first CS course take maybe 10-20 hours each (assuming no prior coding experience), and they’re due biweekly + a weekly take-home lab that should take between 3-5 hours and I’m estimating optimistically for both. A lot of kids spend that much time just in office hours if they’re stuck on a concept. So one 3 unit class is already taking up way over 6 hours of my time a week, I’d say 10-15 on average for this class(there’s also homework sets + studying for midterms). Math classes probably require as much if not more time if you don’t want to fall behind on the curve… but it’s of course likely to vary by person. Some kids are just savants, especially the ones here on scholarships that would have gone to Caltech or MIT - and remember, the less time you say you spend studying, the smarter you look.
If you have good time management abilities, it is easy to have an involvement outside class. Most Viterbi kids had the freedom to choose between Cal/UCLA/USC engineering, and they self-selected into USC because it’s a better match for their preferences, which likely is less to do with the program and more to do with the resources available on campus. There’s far more of a pre-professional emphasis here so most kids do something ‘practical’ alongside their curriculum e.g. hackathons, rocket propulsion lab, startup clubs, personal projects, and a minority manage to participate in greek. I’m not saying this doesn’t happen at other schools, but kids here take it to the next level, e.g. flying to hackathons on the east coast every weekend, or running seeded startups while staying enrolled.
Once you start sharing some of your upper-divs with the international MS students who are literally quantum computers, you really have to start taking the classes seriously because the professors begin setting the passing standards a bit higher.
Engineering degrees are always going to be difficult no matter where you go to school, and it’s not like Viterbi isn’t a highly ranked and recruited school. Even if you spent 50 hours a week doing homework, you would still have plenty of time for extra-curriculars because they’re like a 5 minute walk from your dorm. There’s 168 hours in a week, subtract 60 for sleep/hygiene, 50 for studying, 25 for class, and
you still have 30+ left over for eating out, leisure, whatever. I think engineering students in general like to complain about how much work they have to do to increase the perceived prestige of attaining their degree, and USC students just make less of a fuss over it.
My son is a Sophomore CS Games major in Viterbi. He doesn’t have time for clubs and there was a stretch of around six weeks where he was only getting around 4 hours of sleep a night. CS 103 was time consuming as a Freshman but CS 104 was the killer this semester.
His two roommates, both non Viterbi, have a lot more free time.
6 hours a week? uh? Did they mean per day? My son would probably still laugh at 5-6 hours a day. He puts in a a lot more time than that, but he’s a Dean’s list junior, involved in major coding and hacking organizations, and a TA. But even a “simple” CS major has way more than 6 hours a day or week…I don’t know any major that only has 6 hours per week in college. Think that was back in first grade…
Thank you, @CADREAMIN @GamerGal27 @epicer !