<p>Hi, I was hearing that UC has an enormous amount of work, i was wondering if someone could put a number on this (hrs/week)?</p>
<p>It depends on what classes you’re taking, what your major is, what year you’re in, etc… It’s impossible to assign numbers to the workload.</p>
<p>unalove has an excellent post about the first year courseload here: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/784864-first-year-courseload.html?highlight=language#post1063286754[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/784864-first-year-courseload.html?highlight=language#post1063286754</a></p>
<p>Like Cosmos said though, a lot of it depends on what courses you’re taking and your own abilities, time management, reading speed, etc.</p>
<p>Here’s another recent thread on this topic:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/792809-workload.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/792809-workload.html</a></p>
<p>Oh, thanks, thats really not all that bad, not nearly what i thought it was, seems like 30-40 hours a week according to the first thread</p>
<p>Here’s an actual (somewhat edited) fragment of a call home from one of my kids a while ago: “The good news is that I spent 45 minutes talking to my professor in her office. That’s the longest I have ever been able to hold the attention of a faculty member, and I was proud of myself for going in there. The bad news is that I left with 600 pages of supplemental reading.”</p>
<p>The point is this: At Chicago, and everywhere else, your workload is what you make it. If you want to get more out of your courses, you do more work. Obviously, you can’t do infinite work on everything, and no one would want you to. So you set a balance, and make choices. But, in the end, the more you want to learn, the more you have to work.</p>
<p>S1 called, has a mid term this week. Must read 18 studies prior to the midterm, the midterm will be that the prof will pick 4 to 6 of them to be compared and contrasted in a three hour in class essay without access to the papers. Sounds like fun. How much work does one have to put in to be prepared? I guess it’s up to how well thinks one can do given a certain amount of study.</p>
<p>UofC is different from other colleges, IMHO, because not only do profs assign readings, but also the students read them.</p>
<p>Flash forward to now. D is in grad school at Oxford (UK). Last fall, she would call and complain about how hard it was to find the readings for her grad school courses. Turns out she was the only one doing all the readings. The faculty called her “intimidating”.</p>
<p>Chicago does not assign more work than other schools, I suspect. But the students take the work more seriously that at most places because by and large the students are heavily engaged.</p>
<p>So maybe the best way to view the situation is not that Chicago students are expected to do more work, rather that they choose to do more work because they take it seriously.</p>
<p>I have heard many similar reports, one from an associate who has a PhD from Oxford. Chicago students are the most prepared and intellectually engaged. Though the assigned work may be the same, if everyone understands devouring everthing is not required, then the work load is less as are the expectations of what constitutes “A” work.</p>
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<p>This, this, this!!!</p>
<p>You will realize that you’ll be able to get by in many classes without doing all of the reading-- you’ll be able to participate in class, write a paper based on what you have read, etc. Profs have a tendency to bulk readings by week and not really demarcate what’s absolutely required and what’s optional, so in many classes you do what you can and what makes sense for you.</p>
<p>However, many students end up putting in much more work than they absolutely have to. If Chicago students were only concerned with the bottom line, it would be different</p>