[AMA] Ask a UMass Honors College Freshman

Violet1996
Thu, 19 Mar 2015 04:05:36 +0000

Usually intro classes (100 levels) for a majority of the majors are gigantic. Ex. Intro Psych and Intro to CS have like 500 people each. Classes don’t get small (like below 100) in most majors until like the 300 levels. Also, the school is as large as you make it. Discussions help with down-sizing a class and if a particular class is for your major, it’s not difficult to establish relationships with your professors if YOU take the first step

Honors housing has been in high demand because the freshman honors class keeps getting larger and more people keep getting accepted as internal transfers. This year, about 200/750 freshman got shafted for honors housing. Of the 500 who got the housing, half of them lived in a RAP. Signing up for a RAP in a particular dorm guarantees the housing. The other half just got lucky. Of the 200 that got unlucky, several of them didn’t want to live in Comm Coll. So really about 150/750 students wound up in a bad situation.

For upperclassmen housing, sophomores get priority on the suites and seniors get priority on the apartments, so juniors get the worst of the draw. Junior year is when many people go off-campus (both honors and non-honors)