<p>Twenty years ago I thought Harvard was a breeze compared to my rigorous prep school. Part of it though is that when half your courses are in your major which you love, you may actually be working as hard, but it doesn’t feel like it. Another big difference for me was that I’d spent a gap year achieving fluency in a foreign language so that subject which had been the bane of my existence in high school became really easy in college. (And acquiring a second foreign language also turned out to be easy if time consuming.)</p>
<p>My older son (just graduated comp sci major at Carnegie Mellon) worked much, much harder there than he ever did in high school.</p>
<p>My younger son (freshman at Tufts) is also working much, much harder. He had hundreds of pages of reading every week in one course, papers every week in English and philosophy), and was constantly in danger of drowning in Arabic. He survived with a B-ish average.</p>