Does UChicago live up to its "extremely hard" reputation?

TheBanker
Fri, 20 Mar 2015 00:47:35 +0000

@zzzmmm‌ There are tons of resources. In the HUM and SOSC classes, professors were very accessible — they have weekly office hours, and I usually sat down with each professor 3-4 times per quarter for one-on-one feedback. One of my professors even spent time outside of office hours to revise an entire essay draft. As a non-humanities major, I was pretty surprised to receive this much attention. Granted, not everyone takes advantage of this accessibility, so your experience varies depending on how much you put in, obviously…

It’s more difficult to say once you start taking major-related classes, since some professors are more accessible and others aren’t, and you may end up interacting more with grad student TA’s, who can be hit-or-miss depending on several factors (e.g. language barrier). For one of my Economics classes, I had two TA’s who were phenomenal and collectively held about five extra hours of review per week, double the 2.5 hours that I spent sitting in lecture.

Finally, there’s something called the “Harper Tutors” program, which are grad students who hold “office hours” and tutor undergrads, no appointment needed: https://core-tutors.uchicago.edu