<p>You need to take a deep breath and listen to the PP. I am a sophomore at P, and my best friend from HS is at Stanford. I really do not believe that the workload is significantly different, and yes, the grading is tougher at Princeton, but from the experiences of my friends who graduated from P last year and are about to graduate this year, none seem to be having ANY trouble getting into graduate school, including law school, or getting great jobs, despite GPAs that are not close to 4. And the workload is quite a bit higher in the STEM majors and courses in my experience. I am doing pretty well in a non-STEM major, but with some quant courses such as computer science and stats and econ, and still having a great time with extracurriculars and an active social life. I am very focused and hardworking for 3-4 hours a day many days, but I don’t spend all weekend every weekend working and not every night. </p>
<p>Freshman year is going to be tough for you if you feel you are not well-prepared from your HS, because you may need to learn to write convincing and clear essays that don’t simply regurgitate what you have read, but offer some of your own synthesis and analysis. The grading tends to be toughest in the big intro courses, because the departments overall have grading targets, and they tend to give more As to their upper levels classes. So the lesson is choose your classes wisely, don’t take only big intro courses, and don’t take 3-4 courses that are all supposed to be really tough at the same time. And spread out the type of work (ie try to get some distribution science or language courses, they will have problem sets or more constant work and not just big papers and tests). Take advantage of all the advising available to you in the residential colleges (most of the RAs are junior and seniors and are good resources about course selection I found), and sign up to start for 5 classes and then decide which to drop after a few weeks based on balance and what you are excited by. </p>
<p>Stanford from what I have seen is much less personal, getting help is harder, classes are much bigger, so on balance that could cause plenty of stress as well.</p>