<p>I've been researching, and Reed sounds like a wonderful school to go to; the personal attention, the people, and the curriculum attract me strongly. My one concern is the workload...if I attended Reed, would I be able to enjoy my undergrad experience (Portland on weekends, enjoying the outdoors, have some free time, etc.) or is the entire time at Reed dominated by the workload? Also, is the curriculum so difficult that it is rare to make A's, like Swat? I hope to enroll in medical school, and though I am not entirely obsessed with grades, med school is a rather significant concern for me.
Thanks to anyone who replies!</p>
<p>Let me start with the obvious: just look at the huge percentages of Reedies who go to both Med school and PhD's (scan down this page: <a href="http://web.reed.edu/ir/phd.html%5B/url%5D">http://web.reed.edu/ir/phd.html</a> ). Meaning: don't worry about your grades. Worry about the quality of your education. Grades are not emphasized at Reed; grad/professional schools also know how to adjust for relatively difficult grading scale. Reed is ranked 7th in the country in med school admission rate. (BTW/ the same is true of Swarthmore -- people who attend do not suffer at all in admission to grad schoos.) </p>
<p>Now regarding the workload. Without question there is a heavy work load, and students give priority to their academic tasks over other activities, more so than all but a few other schools that I know of. My son went to Chicago, where I don't think the academic side is quite as demanding as Reed's (but that may be due to my son's own interests and abilities); my daughter went to RISD, where I think the academic demands are equal to Reed's (though in art, of course). They had a "life" outside of their schoolwork. And so did I when I attended Reed.</p>
<p>But there truly is time for other activities depending in part on your interests and organization. Not only for stuff on campus (theater, music, ultimate frisbee, etc.) but also for stuff off campus in Portland a and beyond (Reed's ski cabin on Mount Hood was a regular destination for some of my classmates; spelunking, etc.).</p>
<p>You know, workload will always depend on your major and classes -and if you choose a school where you're better qualified than the majority of your classmates, it will be easier to pull As, but classes may be somewhat boring or frustrating (on the other hand, you may also feel like you get more personal attention from profs b/c you stand out). Most professional schools are aware that some schools tend to give fewer As than others. When all is said and done, don't try to play games -try to choose a good school where you think you'll be able to put your heart into your work.</p>
<p>(And for what it's worth, I do think Chicago academics tend to be very demanding, depending on your major -I think perhaps students at universities tend to be less focused on academics in general, b/c there are so many other distractions)</p>
<p>you get a hell lot of workload round here. I am a freshman taking humanities(required for all), chemistry, math and french classes and I can't go to bed until 2 at night. You read like 50 pages of book every day for your Hum(Humanities 110) classes or you cannot really add meaningful contribution to class. And the Hum 110 also moves real fast so you cannot get bogged down in 1 reading. You just have to skip that and start another if u haven't still done with it.Math and science classes also have a lot of readings but its the homework that counts. you are assigned a homework every week. French(and perhaps other languages) have homeworks every day. You are recommended to spend 2 hours every day for french class. It also moves real fast so you cannot get bogged. Life is hell here if you want to attend every lecture, go to every class and do every homework assigned to you. I usually miss 2/3 classes a week. Maybe it's just because I have taken more classes than usual for my freshman year, but I spend most part of saturdays sleeping, to overcome sleep deprivation . Its only on sundays that I enjoy my undergrad experience.</p>
<p>And I am told that average GPA is 2.9 around here with only 14 reedies with 4.0 in past 20 years. But I don't know whether it's real official figure.</p>
<p>How many hours of homework do you do a week? I have a friend who attended Reed and didn't think the workload was that big a deal...</p>
<p>For Humanities, It's mostly the readings that you have to finish before a lecture. These range from 20-50 pages per lecture. then you have 4 papers semester every one of which requires a week of serious study. for math, you get a problem set every week which is due next week and inclass quiz per week. For chemistry, you have 1 problem set, 1 lab report and 1 conference worksheet due every week. French classes have homework every day and a language lab per week. Its hell at first but later everything settles down to a routine. I don't mean to scare anyone but just trying to tell how I am coping with it. Because I took one more unit than freshmen normally do, and because english is my second language I am having more problems than a typical American kid. Otherwise its an amazing place and professors are really helpful.</p>
<p>From your description, the Hum 110 workload is a bit lighter than when I took it. I looked at the syllabus and it looks just as intensive now as it was then, but I recall having about 100 pages per week on average and 12 papers over the year, i.e., 6 per semester rater than the 4 that you report. None of these papers, except the last required deep research. They did, however, require serious thinking and intrepretation of the assigned readings. They were generally quite short -- 2-3 pages (500-700 words, except for the last, which was about 6-8 pages, 1500 words).</p>
<p>I agree with your description of the work as unrelenting. You are still early in your first year. Not that things let up, but you'll find your rhythm later. I, too, took an extra course my freshman year, at least second semester. That's tough to do at Reed.</p>
<p>That doesn't sound like any more work than most other colleges...</p>
<p>Hey there!</p>
<p>I too am a freshman currently at Reed, taking 4 classes (Hum, Intro Greek, Intro Physics, and Intro to Judaism). Let me tell you this... if you choose to take 4 units, your workload will probably be rather immense (particularly if you add a heavy reading class like intro Judaism). Last weekend I only did about 9-10 hours of work (much of which was a problem set) and that was the lightest the work has been. This weekend I haven't stopped working: about 200 pages of reading for Hum, 50 pages for Intro Judaism, Problem Set for Physics, Greek reading and problems, and two drafts for papers I need to write (10 page Religion paper due Friday, 5-6 page Hum paper due Saturday). This is as heavy as its gotten, give or take some (like the time I was supposed to read all 200 pages of Psalms in two days... on top of everything else). </p>
<p>Now, the good part.</p>
<p>Reed is really amazing and, most of the time, it feels perfectly bearable. I have time to goof off with friends, occasionally go off campus, and do things I like. I won't lie and say that there I always have this, but I can usually find the time not to go insane. About it being no more work than other colleges... I think it depends on the college. All my friends have significantly less work than me (and like to rub it in my face :P). Also, it really does depend on which classes you take. Intro Physics is probably the biggest time hog as problem sets and labs take forever. And then it depends on the person. For example, I haven't gone to bed after one once due to homework and mostly get to bed by eleven. </p>
<p>I would recommend visiting and talking with people. I'm only a freshman and by no means have the "Reed experience" under my belt. Just be forewarned, complaining about workload seems to be the major past time here.</p>
<p>
[quote]
That doesn't sound like any more work than most other colleges...
[/quote]
Ecape, in how many colleges are you required to write 6 papers per semester in one course? Some, but not "most". Now it appears to be 4 per semester in Hum 110 but the papers are longer. That's still more than in "most" colleges.</p>
<p>I should add that I loved Hum 110 and have all my lecture notes and books still after many years. In some ways it is Reed's "signature" course that provides a common language of discourse for all students, regardless of major. But it was a lot of work, and far from typical in either content or the coverage of primary materials. Here's the reading list for Fall '05 semester ( fished off the course webpage <a href="http://academic.reed.edu/humanities/Hum110/syllabimain.html%5B/url%5D">http://academic.reed.edu/humanities/Hum110/syllabimain.html</a> ):</p>
<p>REQUIRED TEXTS:</p>
<p>Aeschylus, The Oresteia, trans. Fagles (Penguin)
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Ross (Oxford)
Freeman, Egypt, Greece, and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean (Oxford)
Harvey, The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing (Hackett)
Herodotus, The History, trans. de Selincourt (Penguin)
Hesiod, Theogony, Works and Days, and Shield, trans. Lombardo (Hackett)
Homer, The Iliad, trans. Lattimore (Chicago)
Martin, Ancient Greece From Pre-Historic to Hellenistic Times (Yale)
Miller, Greek Lyric: An Anthology in Translation (Hackett)
Osborne, Archaic and Classical Greek Art (Oxford)
Plato, The Trial and Death of Socrates, trans. Grube (Hackett)
Plato, Platos Republic, 2nd ed., trans. Grube/Reeve (Hackett)
Presocratics Reader: Selected Fragments and Testimonia, ed. Curd, trans. McKirahan (Hackett)
Sophocles, Sophocles I: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, ed. Grene and Lattimore (Chicago)
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian Wars, Warner (Penguin)
Essays on Ancient Greece (Pamphlet / Bookstore)</p>
<p>RECOMMENDED TEXTS:</p>
<p>Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Fagles (Penguin)
Williams and Colomb, The Craft of Argument (Concise edition) (Chicago)</p>
<p>OPTIONAL TEXTS:</p>
<p>Hurwit, The Art and Culture of Early Greece (Cornell)
Murray, Early Greece, 2nd ed. (Harvard)</p>
<p>my impression has been it isn't the freshmen level courses that it can be hard to keep on top of- it is maintaining that momentum from freshman year and building on it while you increase in intensity as you pursue courses in your major</p>
<p>I chose to take 4.5 units and my schedule is usually filled from 9-4 every day, with occasional 1 hr breaks. But I know a guy who is taking 3.5 units and his classes generally end at 12. so I think it depends how many classes you take and how you organize your schedule.
And many people are not complaining about their workload just to pass their time round here. The work is real big but if you can cope with it it's really fruitful.</p>
<p>mackinaw,
I don't know how I should I learn to love my humanities course, at least the conferences. usually it's a bunch of dominators(some of whom are total hypocrites) who take the argument to outer space and make everyone else feel irrelevant to the general drift of the class. The conference-leader generally rides their horse until it founders(with occasional "I want more voices" remarks). by the end of the conference I think very few know what these guys were arguing abut. But I don't know how many conferences are like that. Most of my friends report their conferences are great, with the professor trying to make everyone feel involved.</p>
<p>I know what you mean, prashant. Some people think they know soooo much, and they egotistically think that everyone else wants to hear what they have to say. Sometimes its tough for the professor to get the conference (seminar) under control if she/he can't tame those types. What you have to focus on is formulating your own point of view and understanding of the materials and issues as well as on articulating this when you can.</p>
<p>that was not what I meant.Except 1 or 2, Most of the people who dominate our conference are not egotistical or hypocrites.They are super-intelligent kids who actually know everything. But its their argument. After 10 minutes they are floating on stratosphere, arguing with the professor about the relationship between Herodotus and Xenophanes, while other ordinary mortals stare at them with awe, taking notes when they use long words. And the conference leader gets carried away, obviously satisfied that he got such 21st century Aristotles in his Symposium.And, i dunno,seems to forget that there are people in his class who have been studying english for only 4 years. I have known people who spend months here and Except their pavlovian gesture of taking notes when they hear long words, they have not done much in the conferences. They say that even if they articulate what they feel important, it seems so simplistic and childish that they don't think its fit for the Symposium.</p>
<p>Well then, it does appear that the professor does need to look beyond the know-everythings. I recall an occasion when my Hum 110 prof apparently reached the conclusion that we were talking and talking but maybe had missed some fundamentals along the way. So, in a very un-Reedlike act, when we walked into conference one one day he told us to take out a piece of paper because he was giving us a "quiz." It had just a few basic questions on it. One of them was, "What does 'Hellas' mean?" I recall that scarcely anybody got it right. Here we were reading Thucydides, etc., and talking about the great events and actors on the scene (Alcibiades, Nicias, etc.), but nobody understood that the word "Hellas" did not mean "Greece" but instead the extended realm in which Greek ideas, language, and culture were influential. And so we were not reading the texts right but instead misconstruing things.</p>
<p>That quiz (there were a couple of other questions) brought everyone down to earth, and got us building up our reading from that ground instead of talking about things going on up in the philosophical air. This was a master stroke by the professor. Sometimes this kind of thing has to be done. I hope your professor realizes the same. By the way, there is nothing at all preventing you from visiting your prof in office hours and talking about your concerns.</p>
<p>I approached my professor with this concern during one of our paper conferences. Except telling me euphemistically that my paper was total crap, (which I knew already),he told me that he would "arrest the flow". He has kept his promise. He arrests the flow. But its even worse. before when they used to discuss one thing for an hour, I used to get some meaning. Now they jump from one topic to another and when you finally think about a clever thing to say for one topic, you find that they have already jumped into another boat. What do you do then, except making a dejected face and stare at a silly Athenian vase painting, trying to get meaning out of it?</p>
<p>Prashant, another point. I did not come from any kind of special secondary school, in which students had read a lot of the classics or deeply into philosophy. I came from a fairly conventional suburban public high school around Los Angeles. But in my class, and in my conferences, there were inevitably some students who had much more experience and much better preparation than I had. And they talked a lot. They knew the answers to things. They had read much of the corpus of literature before. </p>
<p>The material goes by so fast because there is so much of it and so little time, that on a first reading you often can't formulate the questions that need to be formulated by yourself. And so you can learn by listening to some extent, but what you learn are not the answers to questions but instead what the questions are -- what the important, or difficult questions might be -- and how you can approach answering them. And inevitably you realize that you can't master all this in just a few months. But it can excite you and interest you, and when you do have a chance for a closer or second reading (for example on the topics on which you write your papers), then that's when you are on more even ground with those who have read things before they arrived at Reed. Your interpretation, and your understanding do become important and need not be driven by somebody else's rendering of the problem. </p>
<p>That's one of the values, in my opinion, of Hum 110's emphasison on the original and primary texts. Reading Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, etc., without intermediary or secondary sources telling you what's important (at least not til after you've devoted your own effort to understanding and interpreting the texts), well that's what this kind of course is all about. Sure, you have the lectures to focus on some issues and interpretations, but in the end it's you and the text, and your learning how to find what's important in that text.</p>
<p>When you finish the course you're going to say, "Whew!" When you graduate from Reed, you're going to say hooray. But five years later, there's a reasonable chance you're going to say, "I sure wish I could take Hum 110 again. I think I know what the important questions are now, and I would read those texts very differently knowing what I know now." At least that's what happened to me. Not that I've done much going back, but on one alumni college event, some 10 years ago, I had a chance to participate for a couple of days in a reading of a couple of Greek plays, and it was wonderful. My real point, though, is that you're never going to "master" these texts or their analysis in your short first exposure to them. But you can learn how to look at them, and gain some intimate understanding of some of them, and that's a building block for your later life. And in truth, when you do read things again later, your own much greater experience and change in the world around you will lead you to a different reading of the texts than you are making of them now.</p>
<p>I really appriciate your advice. I also kind of thought that ultimately its your interpratation of the text that counts and conferences are just some sort of arena where you can show off, whether you know the things or not.WHAT DO THEY WANT US TO DO IN THE CONFERENCE? I got impression that you need to speak in conference to pass this damned subject. But do you just speak whatever you feel like or give the evidence for it or something? Is it a debate ground where you are graded for your arguments or just a cool hangout where you can just discuss what you have read? And do the professors penalize you for blurting out irrelevent things amidst a sublime discussion? I know I am irritating you by asking you such questions but I would greatly appreciate it if you could help a fellow Reedie.</p>