How many units to take first semester?

ucbalumnus
Wed, 14 May 2014 04:45:43 +0000

13 to 17 units should be fine. Aim for the lower end if you have high workload courses (courses with labs, art studio, music performance, computer programming assignments, or large term projects). You are more likely to be able to handle the higher end if you have low workload courses without the high workload “features”.

1 unit is supposed to mean 3 hours of work per week, including both class time and out-of-class time. Nominally, this means that 15 units means 45 hours of school work per week. Actual workloads are probably less in most cases, except for the courses with high workload “features”.

What you may want to do in phase 2 or the adjustment period is to try for one more class than you intend to take, and then drop the least interesting one (or the one that you are on the waitlist that you are unlikely to get into, or the one that is much higher workload per unit than you expected) to leave yourself a normal number of units and workload.

Of course, your intended major matters in terms of what courses you need to take from the start. So does credit you have going in (AP, IB, A-level, college).