<p>A few practical suggestions (from a parent who once survived the biology major at Cornell and therefore has some idea of what “tough workload” means):</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Sign up for one more course than you really need, with the intent of dropping the most difficult course if necessary. For example, at the college I attended, students must take at least 12 credits per semester, but a freshman can register for as many as 18. So it’s common for people to register for five courses (probably 16 to 18 credits), even though they may end up only taking four (12 to 15 credits). The idea here is that if one course turns out to be impossibly hard, you can choose to drop that one. On the other hand, if you had only signed up for four courses in the first place, you would be stuck with the impossible course. (Adding a new course to your schedule several weeks into the semester is extremely difficult because you are already weeks behind on the work. Dropping a course is about as difficult as returning a library book.)</p></li>
<li><p>Go on rateyourprofessors.com and find some courses where the reviewers say “This is by far the easiest course that I have ever taken at X University.” Find one in a subject you don’t care about (preferably a subject you don’t care about that satisfies a distribution requirement). Sign up for that course.</p></li>
<li><p>If you’re going to be accepting AP credit in a subject and signing up for a more advanced course (say, second or third semester calculus if you have AP credit for the beginning course(s) or intermediate microeconomics if you have AP credit for introductory microeconomics), openly admit to your advisor that you are not sure whether you really have enough background to handle the advanced course. Ask whether you can get permission to sit in on the lectures of the introductory course in addition to the more advanced one. You will probably discover that this is permitted. Then, if you decide after a week or two that the more advanced course is over your head, you at least know what’s going on in the lower-level course, and you won’t be too far behind in the assignments if you transfer into that class.</p></li>
<li><p>Consider including one course in your first-semester schedule for which you are grossly overqualified. This may mean waiving an AP credit and taking a course that you could have placed out of. It could mean taking introductory music theory for non-majors even though you’ve been playing six instruments since kindergarten. It could mean deliberately screwing up the foreign language placement test so that you can place into a level lower than the one for which you are really qualified. Whatever. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>The idea of all of these tricks is to make things a little bit easy for yourself the first semester, to give yourself time to adjust to the college workload and see just how bad it really is. Of course, people who use these tricks learn a bit less than those who take a full schedule of demanding courses from the very beginning. But sometimes covering your ass is more important than learning. Or, to put it another way, learning how to cover your ass is likely to be more important to your future life than anything you learn in biology or calculus.</p>