<p>I’m a humanities person all the way, but I’ll try to address some of your concerns and questions.</p>
<p>First, I applaud you for questioning these “rankings” and what they may mean to you. I think a good program in any field is one which has good professors (virtually any school will have at least some good ones), course offerings that are appropriate for your level and in your areas of interest, and opportunities that are accessible and exciting.</p>
<p>With regards to core, I think it is right for some people and it isn’t right for others… it’s a matter of how you like to be pushed and what you believe your education should be like. If I had no core requirements, I would be tempted to take English classes all day long, and nothing but. I’m not really sure, though, how much I would benefit from taking 100% English courses… especially when that’s what I plan to be doing in grad school… The core shook me up a little bit, made me visit other academic fields (social science, art history) and revisit demons from my past (biology). It also gave me confidence to take academic risks-- once you’ve braved through Marx, everything else seems easy in comparison. Also, I feel more encouraged to diversify my courseload. This quarter I will taking a sociology class and an art history class, not because I have to, but because I want to, because the course titles interested me, and my experiences with the subjects in core directed me there. </p>
<p>If you’re worried about the core curriculum taking away from hardcore math, I personally don’t have much experience with balancing the two, but I would imagine that the typical student spends 3-5 hours a week on homework for humanities, civ, or social science core (probably much less on the others) and 30+ hours a week on honors analysis. The math courses that come in between regular calc and honors analysis (IBL honors calc, for example) vary somewhat from student to student and class to class… I would say my friends spend anywhere from 5-15 hours a week on those classes. Balancing math with core is possible, and core will probably be a pinprick in comparison to the work that you’ll be doing on math.</p>
<p>Anecdotally… a lot of the students I know who end up choosing the U of C over other superexcellent schools (I’m particularly thinking about the HYPSMC cohort) tend to be math majors. Of course, I don’t have the data to back that up, but I imagine that the “nerd culture,” the balance of math/science with humanities/social sciences, and the emphasis on theoretical concepts serve as a draws for really top math students.</p>