Huntsman vs Princeton

ec1234
Wed, 07 Apr 2010 11:34:47 +0000

At princeton, a LOT of the famous professors teach intro level and/or non major classes. Plus the freshman seminars give you a chance to really interact with the professors. In my department (biology), two of the most famous professors, Eric Weischaus (nobel prize) and Bonnie Bassler (MacArthur grant), teach MOL101, which is the class for non-majors. David Botstein came to princeton in order to set up the integrated science curriculum, which is for freshmen and sophomores. Additionally, for most humanities/social sciences classes there are no hard prereqs- I took some 300/400 level classes as a freshman because I was interested in the subject matter. So you definitely do get to be taught by the famous professors that you have heard of.

In terms of switching majors, you don’t declare your major until the end of sophomore year. Not a ton of people switched majors after that, although I did know some. However, a lot of people ended up majoring in something that they did not plan on majoring in when they enrolled. In my experience, engineers switched majors a lot more than ABs, because they have to declare freshman year. So they change their mind and switch majors, while ABs change their mind and just declare a different major.