This "article" is being shared all over facebook at my school. It's so ironic, so painful, so deathly frustrating that someone complaining about taking over 16 credit-hours in a semester compiled 5 reasons against the fact, with #5 being: "it's not a good idea."
I hate Odyssey with a burning fucking passion. "Here, we made a website that's like BuzzFeed, except with even shittier writing and it's just for millennials! There's no professional editors and you're paid based on clicks (but probably not paid at all)! It's a great way to validate the fuck out of your dumbass friends when they write terrible listicles about stupid shit!"
Aren't credit hours different school to school though? 15 (about 5 classes) was the average for a liberal arts major at my school (18 was the more common one I found), while STEM tended to have higher degree requirements like 18-21 (6-7 classes, sometimes 8).
I'm taking 20 credit-hours, my roommate is taking 25 this semester. 25 credit hours is hard, at least at my college along with the very demanding athletic team for which he has daily practice. My 20 amounts to 6 courses, 4 on one day 2 the next day. This is considered an average load at my school for freshmen. I also haven't picked a major yet, which will increase my mandatory courseload to graduate, and increase my credit hours, but i will also have knocked out the core courses that fill up my schedule before declaring a major, so I hope to stay balanced around 23 per semester maximum for the rest of my undergrad. I didn't even know about ECTS beforehand so I can't offer an opinion on that conversion ratio, but if 51 ECTS is really around 30 credit-hours, that is beyond fucked and I hope for the sake of your sanity that it is not the case.
so 51 hours of just lectures/practicals/labs. Others things amounts to about 4-5 hours? So 56 hours a week? On top of all the other things you listed before, you are well over 60 hours of just school related work every week? Is that how that works? If that's the case that seems a bit wild to me.
That's about what I was at most of junior and senior year of undergrad if you include all the library time. Reading and research takes time, and I'm not going to set any records for writing speed. Sometimes more, sometimes less depending on deadlines.So 56 hours a week?
I mean towards the end of my college career, and good portions of my early college career I worked 25-30 hours a week, was in lectures for at least 15-18 hours a week, and then library. I still had time to hang out though. I'm just more surprised that 51 of Devac's hours are solely dedicated to in-class related stuff. I mean that doesn't include any library time really. That's the only part that really surprises me.
If I googled correctly that Swedish course is quite advanced. Where and why are you studying Swedish?
This is awesome. And thanks for sharing your courses, it's really interesting to look at. As War pointed out in this post thread, it's highly likely that different colleges have different ways of assigning credits. In other words, "credit-hours" may not be as universal in the U.S. as I imagined. Therefore I still have no way to compare your courseload with a unit of measurement, but based on the quantity and kinds of courses you're taking, I'm just going to wish you the best of luck and imagine you're some kind of Jimmy Neutron motherfucker.
Those are very good reasons. I'm myself terrible at learning languages but currently fluent in two so that's nice. I'm always fascinated when someone outside Sweden learns the language. There's that sense seeing your hometown pop up in the news.
I can offer some insight, since I went to Canada for a semester. I actually got in a bit of a kerfuffle with my exchange coordinator because I only got 6 ECTS per four credit course - my faculty expected me to do 5 courses. However, almost all of the other exchange students, including those from the same university as mine, got 7.5 ECTS per course so they could do four courses and be done with it. In the end, I also did four courses, totaling 16 credits and taking home 24 ECTS. They were 400 and 500 courses (third and fourth year courses), essentially the most advanced level of undergraduate courses there. Got straight As on three of them. Fourth was a group effort, so a B- IIRC. I think I could've done a fifth course or five easier courses plus lots of parties, but that is not why I went to Canada.
Are "practicals" the typical amount of homework time for each class? Do your physics problems for one class actually take you 3 hours or less each week? Are non-Devac people taking longer?
phew OK, finally free for more than a five minute interval at a console. Comparing our respective situations is worse than apples to oranges, but I guess I'll just tell you what's up with me anyway. Last fall, I took six hours of research credit, where the assumption is that the student works three hours a week for each credit hour (I laughed when I found that out), and three hours of credit for "one" class, classical mechanics. So first, the research. Some weeks, I only put in fifteen hours, and others it was sixty-five, probably averaged out to just north of thirty. Went to two conferences during the semester. Not by any means normal for the second fall of grad school, but as you know, my project is one of the most competitive in the game, and I'm lucky to have my advisors working so intently with me to get my name out there. I'm writing code (data parsing w/ some calculus), writing papers, reading the publishing record, giving presentations, attending telecons, running some models, etc., so, y'know, exactly what I'll be doing when I get my pedigree. I love it, I think I was born to work on this stuff. Now, the course. Oh god, what a train wreck. Put on your seatbelts, or skip this paragraph entire, folks, lotsa bitchin' and wallowin'. To start, we covered the first four hundred pages of Fetter and Walecka (skipping chapter 8 only), and used other texts as well several times throughout the semester. My final homework (the last of twelve) covered shocks, hydromagnetics, and all regimes of nonlinear surface (soliton) waves, including tidal bores. It took me so long that I won't be estimating the number of hours, out of sheer self-disgust and embarrassment. We spend the entire time in class deriving the backbone of the theory from first principles, only occasionally pausing to consider a specific example. When I was studying for the final, I realized that the last time I had seen a problem worked out was when I was looking at the study exam for the midterm. This next one's on me; I couldn't even seem to find the time to look at the solutions to the previous homework sets. It wasn't super crucial, because I always managed to complete my homework to 90% or better, even if it damn near killed me. Still, would've been nice to have the time to see how someone else solved the problems, but I just can't afford to look backwards during the semesters. I worked almost entirely alone on the homework and studying, as all the kids in my year took this course last fall. I've also gone into the department's library and dug up old exams from the 1990's in this same course, and it was taught by the same professor! Interestingly, he's really started cranking up the difficulty level since then, in both the depth and breadth of the course. Maybe he thinks that the kids coming through grad school are just getting smarter as the years go by, which is debatable, at best. The students' response to him upping his demands are to work together on the homework, and I believe that they are cheating on the take-home exams. There are several students in the class who suspect a large group of the others to be cheating, and the competition in the grade distribution is very cutthroat, or else I wouldn't bother putting in an extra twenty hours to attempt perfecting the homeworks. After hearing the midterm's class average, I considered demanding that the final be an in-class exam, but had no leverage to do so, since I would be at a conference. Woof. A couple of weeks I only needed twenty hours to do the homework, but most weeks it was closer to forty. Except for the last two weeks that cost me at least eighty hours each to crunch through to get the last assignment perfect (meh, I got a 95%, found out today). C'mon, all of fluid dynamics, shocks, and nonlinear solitons in six or seven lectures of seventy minutes each. No one in the class had even seen fluid dynamics yet. My undergrad experience was, of course, a bit more in line with yours. Still, I was left to flounder more often than not. Less instruction and more homework, in general, and I think the courses covered a broader range of subjects. Maybe that accounts for some of the discrepancy in credit hours, but nowhere near all of it (see next paragraph). Besides, grades, credit hours, and degrees are just the bookies' way of measuring academic ability. I have a lot of problems with that last sentence, but I try to jump through the hoops. Sometimes. Oh yeah, and Devac, you're not "normal", even by the standards inside an academic bubble. Embrace it :). Edit: Are you on ResearchGate yet?
It's all good man, this semester will be a much more pleasant experience, it looks like. Oh yeah, and my poor girlfriend has just been left out to dry, I really wish I had more time to give. Grad school is such a fucking selfish thing. The list of people I should thank in my acknowledgements sections is ever growing. I think ResearchGate has the potential to change the publishing process. There's some (very small) chance that a communal peer-review system could be instituted with limited success for up to as long as several months before the system destroys itself or is quietly bought out by whoever. Plus, right now, everyone's scientific contributions are condensed into one easy-to-remember number! Anyway, many of my coauthors are posting full-length uploads, figures and all, of articles that were just published in pay-to-access journals. If I'm remembering correctly, there's some kind of loophole that allows you to retain rights to the content before it's formatted into the way that it appears in the journal...? I'm interested to know if you're leaning in the direction of a particular discipline yet.