Current Princeton Students: Post Freshman Schedule Here

w0mbat
Sat, 14 Jul 2007 15:02:10 +0000

Albert - I took Intensive Chinese without any reading/writing experience and I’ll agree that it was a lot of work. We spent 6 hours in class each week (5 hours of speaking practice and 1 hour testing), and were expected to write weekly essays, attend individual sessions, and learn 50-100 characters outside of class. The course definitely covered a lot though - I think the final count was 1,500-2,000 characters, and the instructors also emphasized pronounciation and grammar structures.

Weasel - have you done math proofs before? It seemed like people who had worked a lot with formal math didn’t find the course difficult, while the people who had no proof experience had a much harder time (of course, this is just a generalization). The class moves along at a certain pace, and it’s kind of sink-or-swim. I’d guess that the same is probably true for many honors math/science courses (including maybe orgo). I got to experience both sides of it - 215 was pretty straightforward for me, but I hadn’t seen enough physics to be comfortable in the 105 course, and I screwed up spectacularly on the first couple exams and had to work extra hard to dig myself back out.

It seems like most people band together early on and tackle the problem sets in groups, which helps. If you’re able to find a copy of the textbook (Rudin - Principles of Mathematical Analysis), that’ll probably give you the best idea of what to expect. I think you can also find some of the old tests and stuff online.