Swat '07 Will Try to Answer Q's

momof3sons
Wed, 11 Jan 2006 21:55:32 +0000

Hi, this is mom of momof3 sons again. I just wanted to add that Swat gives students the opportunity to take 4 courses credit/no credit after first semester freshman year. This allows a student the opportunity to take a course he/she might otherwise avoid for a number of reasons. For example, my son took a course in the music dept. this past semester credit/no credit. He had previously taken two sequential courses in that dept. and this was the third in the sequence. He knew how much work the course entailed and it would be populated basically by music majors/minors. Taking this course credit/no credit put his mind at ease because he knew that he would not have the time to do all the work this course entailed. (With this course he was taking the equivalent of 5 credits.) He could certainly put a lot of time into the course and learn a lot from it, but didn’t feel that he had to dot every “i” and cross every “t,” if you get my drift.

Also, as an honors poli. sci. major and honors history minor, while his work entails much reading and writing at this point, things weren’t always this way. Before junior year he took courses in many different depts., including math, physics, economics, religion, philosophy and chemistry. That entailed balancing weekly problem sets with reading and writing.