<p>the GPA haha (and it’s so unknown in the city some people who go to UIC actually think they go to U OF C lol…I’m not kidding either)</p>
<p>Hi everybody, I’m a freshman here who just finished his first quarter. I LOVE IT HERE and cannot say enough good things about Chicago. It has met and even exceeded my expectations in every regard. The people are great (students and professors alike), the professors are brilliant, the social scene is decent, and the classes are challenging. I love the intellectual conversations I have here that go late into the night. I also love the campus, which is just so goddamn beautiful especially when it snows. Probably the only thing I dislike so far is I finished the term with a lower-than-expected GPA, which has caused me to re-evaluate my lifelong ambition to go to a top law school. I was expecting a higher GPA because I worked very hard and I’d like to think I’m pretty smart (2300+ SAT, a lot of 5s on APs, top 3% in a competitive high school, etc), and I set a goal to get into Harvard or Yale for law school, but I guess I overestimated how well I’d perform. I have a 2.7 right now, but I’m hoping to raise it up to above 3 and hopefully I can get a high LSAT score to offset it. What I like about UChicago though is it makes you appreciate learning truly for learning’s sake and make you go out of your comfort zone even at the cost of your GPA. When you think about the bigger picture, your undergrad GPA will NOT matter in the long run but rather what is in your head and your attitude towards life. </p>
<p>Take note though that my academic performance so far might not be indicative of other students’ performance. There could very well be many who are getting above a 3. Maybe I’m just not as smart as I thought, am doing something wrong or something else. If you other Chicago freshmen can shed some light on your experiences, I think that would be helpful.</p>
<p>sorry about your gpa chicago2014baby. BTW, it’s first years not freshmen :p. At first my only real fear at UChicago is the GPA, with the fun, you know, dying and all. I thought I would be tied to my desk laboring day and night. It turned out to be a totally different experience. I had fun while at the same time did well with my grades - 3.78. The people I hang out with at my house did well too. I think what helped was I was able to find people to study with and hang out with fairly quickly. I would not have gotten a good grade in math 199 (Intro to Analysis) without the help of my study buddies. Same with my other classes. I think the key for me was to find these friends I was able to study with. UChicago is hard but these friends made it less so. And to all prospies who think all I did was study - I had a rule to have fun at least two nights a week. Usually Friday and Saturday. I have explored the city a lot - plays, restaurants, museums, opera, etc. Went to all sorts of parties - house, apartments, frats. Did intramurals sports and in a lot of nights/early mornings just played board games or hung out at lounge with my housemates. It was a great first quarter for me. Hoping you find your groove.</p>
<p>Of course it varies from person to person. I made a 3.6 this quarter after working very hard, when I was probably not as strong a candidate as OP. (2200, my school didn’t rank but I actually had a lower GPA at my high school, which was an early-enrollment in college school than my first quarter here, because I was expecting to have to work much harder, so I did.) Most of my friends made roughly the same grades as me with varying levels of work, from significantly more, to barely any work at all (though they were graced with some easy professors.)</p>
<p>Moral of the story, this is just one person’s experience, so take it that way.</p>
<p>@op, you sound like my S1 who is sophomore premed at cornell. His first semester was barely 3.0 and he had a rough winter break at home – analyzing his options and scenarios depending on his future performances. His next two semesters were 4.0 each, so he is pushing it up the hard way (he says its at 3.6 or so now). He had 2370 sat and a prestigous State-wide scholarship and cornell scholarship when he entered. He says he had to adjust a lot after the first semester in how he studies, ‘thinks’, and how he takes breaks for fun weekly. my S2 is in chicago ea and is considering his options although the large loan in his estimated FA may prevent him from enrolling. Hope you find the right way .</p>
<p>Hum, Sosc, and an accelerated language. Essentially, I had 200 pages of reading, and an hour of language study every night and difficult papers every week. As of right now, I’m not sure I’d recommend taking Hum and Sosc at the same time.</p>
<p>I took HUM, Math 153<em>, and Honors Intro to Computer Science, and my workload was very manageable</em>*. 15-20 hours of homework and studying outside of class, plus working, made for reasonable time commitments and a GPA I’m very happy with.</p>
<ul>
<li>last quarter of the regular Calculus sequence
** it might have been because I shouldn’t really have been in 153 . . .yay slacking!</li>
</ul>
<p>I took Human, Being, and Citizen with Agnes Callard, an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department. HBC is generally seen as the ‘classic’ HUM course; this quarter, we covered the Illiad, Genesis, and a good bit of Plato, and next quarter we’ll be working on Nicomachean Ethics, Confessions, and the Inferno.</p>
<p>@ Rny2, I certainly saw Chicago’s Core as a strong positive for the school, but now that you list the books, I realize that I have already read all of the books you listed (plus a good bit of Plato, although there is inevitably something of Plato I haven’t read.) Is there something in these classes that makes rereading ponderous books worth it? Also, what are some other good/popular courses that fulfill the HUM requirement?</p>
<p>I definitely feel that getting to read these texts in a college setting is worth a re-read or two. Like you, I’d already read many of these books, either in high school or privately, but the experience in my HUM class was much different. The Core is not exactly a Great Books program, in that the emphasis isn’t on the texts themselves but rather on the ideas and themes that echo through them: the ‘Great Conversation,’ if you will. I definitely felt like I was not in a literature class; we might start the class with a scene in the Illiad, but within ten minutes we’d be on the rationality of anger and its resolution and beyond. As I’m not very fond of literary analysis, I was very thankful for this aspect of the class. </p>
<p>Also, because the emphasis was shifted from the text itself, the reading assignments were much more relaxed than those I had in high school. While we might get a decent load of pages to read, we weren’t going to be quizzed on minute details and plot artifacts, letting us relax and really soak in the pieces. I recall reading the Illiad in high school was extremely ponderous and slow, while reading it in HUM this quarter was really quite enjoyable.</p>
<p>Oh gee. Looking at this, I wonder if it’s worth it for me to sent that “HI YOU’RE STILL MY FIRST CHOICE” letter after being deferred. I’m in a cutthroat high school right now, and it’s hell (although I have pretty decent grades). Don’t know if I can take more of this.</p>
<p>Where does one get the idea that Chicago is cutthroat? What exactly was it about the environment at your high school that you didn’t like? From my admittedly limited experience, competition did not have a major presence in my classes (though I’m neither pre-med nor want to do IBanking). Yes, it’s hard work, but for many, perhaps most people, it’s work that you love.</p>
<p>First, my experience was that my grades (in the soft social sciences) were wildly inconsistent. An A in one class would be a B in another. I had a 4.0 one quarter and barely lifted a finger and a much less shiny GPA another quarter when I was chucking in a lot more hours. Accept that grades are not necessarily a reflection of you or your intelligence, but rather that they are relatively arbitrary. If you internalize that, you’ll be miles ahead of where I was as a first-year.</p>
<p>And… high school learning is not necessarily college learning. What gets you good grades in high school (paying attention, participating in class, memorizing things and sounding smart) doesn’t work as well here. In college, it’s a lot about your thinking-- whether that be on a problem set or in a paper-- and there’s less patience for the “high school” mindset. </p>
<p>Another note: if the worst thing that happens to you in your life is you realizing that you might not be interested in law school after all, I don’t count that as a bad thing per se. If you do at some point decide you want to go to law school, go because you want to, not because you think it will employ you. Please.</p>
<p>Another first year here. I finished with a GPA I’m happy with. I really haven’t experienced a sense of cut-throat competition here. Okay, maybe there is a little element of it in honors chem, but it’s not a lot by any means. What I have experienced is that there are a lot of very smart people here and it can be hard to keep things in perspective when you score below average on a midterm (even if the average is high). If you are a person who is really focused on how other people are doing compared to yourself, you might feel some pressure, but I’ve never felt like other people are out to get me or anything.</p>
(and it’s so unknown in the city some people who go to UIC actually think they go to U OF C lol…I’m not kidding either)</p>