<p>I appreciate Aristotle’s input and I don’t want to second-guess it. I’ll just add that in my experience, the kids who turned out to be the ones most worth knowing are not the kids who wear their intellect or their talents on their sleeve. I also know that as a first-year in a sea among relative strangers, one is attracted to others who are internally and externally consistent.</p>
<p>Aristotle’s comments about the workload also ring true, in a sense: the workload here is incredibly variable. I don’t spend a lot of time on schoolwork, to be perfectly honest, but I do a lot of other things. I have friends who spend a lot more time on schoolwork than I do, both here at the University and at other schools. (My friends with the most rigorous workloads go to schools like Oberlin, Harvard, and Syracuse-- none of which is particularly known for grueling workloads, but in each case, the workload was self-selected).</p>
<p>However, if the OP were taking Chinese, Hum, Sosc (a non-Mind sequence), and Honors Calc, I think he or she would have different opinions on workload. OP does not have to take those classes.</p>
<p>So, in sum: it is not hard to graduate from the University of Chicago. It is not hard to party 4 nights a week, take as many easy classes as possible, and maintain a relatively high GPA. However, the vast, vast majority of students do not take this track, and will take challenging classes that they don’t have to take and spend more time studying than they have to. I think those trends say a lot more about the students than they do about the school.</p>