'getting admitted is the most exhausting part'

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<p>Here’s my conclusion so far. There are “tough schools” where almost all students will find a challenging curriculum that requires them to work hard, if not “harder” than in high school. These colleges are in the minority. Then, there are many schools where a student will work hard if he chooses specific majors, courses, professors, etc. These colleges could be very selective, elite schools or they could be directional universities.</p>

<p>IOW, it’s very easy to get through college without breaking much of a sweat. That’s in line with the theme of “Academically Adrift” and other writings.</p>

<p>D has not found professors unapproachable – to the contrary, professors/TA’s, proctors very engaging if one makes the effort to have a discussion. The experience is what the student makes of it – if student takes challenging courses and makes the effort to delve deep they will have a rewarding experience. Also depends if students are shooting for an A, or the B to get by. If student takes easiest courses and does what is minimally necessary and concentrates on partying, school may seem a breeze (or perhaps a “blur” :>)</p>

<p>SVMom – curious if your son took Math 55 as a math major – a course I have never heard anyone describe as easy?</p>

<p>Our daughter just finished her first year in hard core, broad breadth upper class courses with a very respectible GPA. Focus is in math and commerce, but the others were not milk toast.</p>

<p>My take: if you go to Harvard and find it easy figure out why that is so, and seek out more demanding professors. Push yourself, as life will push you.</p>

<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>

<p>OP,
"I wonder how common it is for college students to find their academic work relatively easy, even less challenging than all the preparation leading up to college acceptance. "</p>

<p>-Acceptance is the easiest part and a fun one. I have never heard that it is easy at college. As opposite, I heard from very high caliber HS kids (some graduated #1 from their repsective HS, some are private prep.) that college classes are exceptionally challenging, much more so than they expected. Some intro classes are going thru AP material in 2 weeks and then move on and some top Honors kids are falling out of their original track, just get weeded out, unless they adjust very quickly. I am talking about state public colleges. I have no idea about Ivy’s or Elite schools.</p>

<p>“it is possible to get through Harvard and a number of other high-price universities acing your computer science classes and devoting very little effort to anything else.”</p>

<p>Anybody who is “acing” (getting straight A’s) computer science classes at Harvard is either very smart AND working hard in those classes, or a truly remarkable intellectual talent. Anything is a breeze if you are sufficiently gifted. My GPA was in the top 5% or so of my Harvard class, but I never took CS, and it would have kicked my butt if I had. That’s a demanding field and decidedly not where my gifts lie.</p>

<p>I know plenty of premeds that had taken all the pre-med classes by the time they got to college. They didn’t take anything extra than they had too, so getting an outstanding GPA at their ivy was not that taxing for them. There are disincentives toward challenging oneself academically. If they were going to work harder, it would be on ECs they could use for med school because they already had ‘enough’ academics.</p>

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<p>I would revise that to say that at any college, the challenge and the workload is dependent on what you choose to make it–far more so than in HS. However at the more selective schools there is a culture of choosing the challenge. Not to say you can’t do so at Directional State, but it’s a lot harder to party if everybody else is in the library.</p>

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<p>Yes, and related to this is that some kids find the college atmosphere so much more enjoyable overall than high school, where they felt constrained and regimented by parents and rules they considered arbitrary.</p>

<p>college…,
"I know plenty of premeds that had taken all the pre-med classes by the time they got to college. They didn’t take anything extra than they had too, so getting an outstanding GPA at their ivy was not that taxing for them. There are disincentives toward challenging oneself academically. If they were going to work harder, it would be on ECs they could use for med school because they already had ‘enough’ academics. "</p>

<p>-This sounds more like fantasy than reality. If there are geniuses like that, there are definitely not plenty of them. Besides, most colleges (including lower ranked state schools, forget Ivy’s and Elite) strongly advise ore even require to retake Medical Schools required classes after having A’s and 5’s in AP’s. D’s college into Bio at state school went thru AP material in first 2 weeks, then they move on to new material which had laid foundation to all of her Bio classes. She had mentioned that she would have been in trouble if she skipped that first Bio. She had graduted #1 from prep. private HS class, had both Honors and AP Bio (5 on exam) and had used the same Bio textbook in HS as in college first Bio class. </p>

<p>She had not met any pre-med in her Honors college who survived without putting enourmous efforts. Many Honors kids who were very top caliber students primarily from prep. private HS, actually did not survive in pre-med track, they fell out after the first Bio class or later.</p>

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<p>I went to a magnet school where the average SAT score matched HYP. And the people who managed to get into the ivies could coast if they wanted to. It’s not a fantasy. (We had all taking organic chem and a lot of other advanced classes.) For instance, my multi-variable calculus class in high school was actually significantly harder than MIT’s (although in fairness, I didn’t take the theoretical version of calculus at MIT, just the regular version).</p>

<p>MIT and Caltech in general were exceptions, but even there if you majored in bio or applied math (rather than engineering) and took a manageable class load it wasn’t that taxing.</p>

<p>From my observation, there is a significant minority of people at the top ivies that can and do coast because it is not in their best interests to challenge themselves academically. This is why I don’t like how medical schools do their selection. There is a disincentive for further intellectual growth.</p>

<p>I’m sorry but I am still laughing about the kid majoring in math at Harvard that said “it is a breeze”. You have to be kidding me. Some people forget that there are those few among us that are trully brilliant and anything they do will be a breeze. I would say that is one cocky kid.</p>

<p>I have three sons that went to a very good Magnet highschool. They each busted their butts at MIT and Cornell.</p>

<p>^That may be true, but there are easier paths you can take.</p>

<p>For instance, at MIT you can take applied math or you could take theoretical math with the Putnam team. It’ll look the same on your resume’.</p>

<p>And if you’re covering material you’ve seen before, then it’s not that tough. There aren’t that many premed classes, so it’s not that uncommon to have taken all of them before college.</p>