Life at Penn State

khcpsu
Wed, 06 Apr 2005 21:22:45 +0000

I’m a freshman bioE major, so my classes are pretty set. First semester I took chem 12 (gen chem 1), chem 14 (lab), math 251 (ordinary and partial differential equations), ed&g 100H (engineering design and graphics honors), engl 30 (honors freshman composition), and bioE 100S (first year seminar). This semester I’m taking math 231 (calc 3), math 220H (matrices), cmpsc 201C (c++ and matlab), phys 211 (mechanics), chem 13 (gen chem 2), chem 15 (lab), sts 497K (seminar for something), and kines 11 (skiing). Mind you a bunch of these classes second semester and like one credit, like the lab, skiing, and the seminar, so I’m taking 17 credits. Last semester it was 15 credits. Most of the freshman-y classes aren’t too hard to get good grades in, in my opinion if you’re doing the work (the math classes listed aren’t freshman-y so don’t think this is true of them). Basically the way you’re going to get bad grades in freshman classes is if you slack off. They’re designed to make you pay if you’re not going to class and sitting outside all day.

PSU is definitely a good place for freshman because you can meet people from all years, etc. It’s probably better to go as a freshman because everyone is new to it, thus friends are easier to make in the fall than say the next year, when everyone already has a social network, not that it’s that hard to make friends anyway, but this is a relative comparison.