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I was wondering how other students feel about the workload at Northwestern.

By Zcat18 (Zcat18) on Thursday, September 02, 2004 - 11:24 pm: Edit

It depends on your major and ability. Engineering majors do a LOT of work and generally seem to find it rather difficult (with the exception of those who just happen to be unusually gifted in math and the sciences, and even they complain about the difficulty occasionally). I'm not in Tech, but I'd venture to guess that the average Tech student has 4 or more hours of homework a night. Econ students also seem to mention a heavy workload, though not nearly as taxing as that of the engineering students.

There are some majors, on the other hand (Communications, English, some humanities) where you will barely even notice you're in school. In the end, it's all what you make of it. NU, I believe, is designed to allow you a life as well as an academic challenge. You'll have weeks here and there where you'll feel like there's nothing more to life besides studying, and then there will also be times where you'll have no work at all (usually at the beginning of the quarter if you're a humanities major).

Overall, the workload is rigorous but manageable--about par for the course for a school like NU. Don't let the workload scare you away, because no college will accept a student who they don't know for sure can handle the pressure.

By Tenisghs (Tenisghs) on Friday, September 03, 2004 - 12:39 pm: Edit

I agree with Zcat. Also, make sure in your freshman year you get your foreign language, freshman seminars and some (preferably 1/2) of your distributions out of the way. You don't want to be a junior/senior and realize you have to take a math or science class when you're a humanities major! Take some introductory major classes (if you have declared a major) and have fun (hang out, join clubs). Don't be too quick to jump into higher-level classes if you haven't taken the prerequisites for the course. Don't take a stressful workload that you can't handle. Don't procrastinate or skip classes as a habit either. Adapt to the campus environment and academics.