<p>yeah you guys are right, I just looked it up...surprising, because cornell has a lot of pre-professional type majors and it's so diverse...also surprises me there's no nursing program, apparently it was shut down in the 70's...weird.</p>
<p>i always find the threads discussing cornell's difficulty a bit misguided. it depends on what your goals are. premeds find it difficult because they have to obtain A's, and A's are only handed out to a minority of the students in most classes. the difficulty lies not in the material or workload (these are probably not much different than other top schools) but in the competition- a 'weedout' premed class like orgo, bio, etc tends to have b- medians. that said, for the students who are satisfied with a c-,c, or b-, orgo is not 'difficult' at all. there those who study their asses off, beat the mean by a standard deviation, and still end up with a b+ or a-. these will find these types of classes much more difficult. </p>
<p>rambling again, but my point is, if your goals for achievement are average (i think the avg is like 3.0 or even higher), you won't find it too difficult. a 3.7+ will come with far more what they call 'sweat, blood, and tears.'</p>
<p>I just want to pop in and comment about my experience first semester. I plan to be a math/economics double major, which is a fairly popular choice. Economics, in my opinion, is currently an "easy" major mainly because it only requires 8 classes (I think). However, you can always find challenging economics courses, especially since a lot of economic professors at Cornell have a theoretical focus to their research. Math, for me, definitely appears more challenging. The harder classes are quite abstract and difficult, but I expected nothing else from studying math.</p>
<p>What about workload? The math homework from my class took about 5-10 hours a week, depending on how well I understood the material and how focused I was throughout it. For me, economics 3010 homework took about one to two hours each week. None of that included studying, which I tended to do at various times whenever I felt like it. That is to say, there is plenty of spare time. Homework for my friend in Calculus II seemed to just be several problems a week that could be done in an hour or so. In my opinion, any difficulty in math and economics came more from understanding concepts than mandatory workload. I can't speak for the science and engineering courses, although I can see why they could be tough: a lot of memorization, reasoning, and a healthy amount of labs.</p>
<p>That said, as a math/science person, I don't see many of the humanities as easy majors. I have a friend doing history, and he handles it very well. I know I would die reading so much and writing so much, though. I took French, and the workload was fairly intense. Friends taking Russian and Mandarin said their workloads were even greater. Since I was stuck in a freshman writing seminar I did not enjoy, that work was a bother too. No matter how good I might be at writing, essays still take several hours to type, look up references, cite, etc. As it turns out, I'm not good at writing, and I have a short attention span, so it was painful. But I know someone else who enjoyed their writing seminar and had no problems with it.</p>
<p>What can I say? It certainly depends on the sort of person you are, your prior knowledge, work ethic, dedication, and all that jazz others have mentioned. Despite not enjoying some subjects I needed to take for requirements, I never found the workload to be unreasonable or unmanageable. Don't let that put you off.</p>
<p>As for a comparison with HYP, I can't say. I'd imagine it, for no logical reason at all, to be about the same.</p>
<p>I was planning for math+econ so thanks a lot, it definitely did help</p>