How many schools did YOU apply to?

[DVMDream]

I think Fine Arts majors get a bad rap. I can honestly say that I worked my butt off as a Studio Art major. Once I declared my major, the Art profs demanded so much more of me than my non-major peers. I could easily work for hours. One professor even suggested we sleep in our studios. He would come "check" on us at 1am to make sure we were working. That said, I definitely understand what it's like to live with a roommate who does minimal work. My roommate would watch her favorite TV shows or be online all the time. She'd also sleep in until 10am everyday. Still got straight A's.

My best friend in undergrad majored in interior design and is now getting a master's in interior design.... The amount of work she did for her degree was insane. She constantly had projects that would take weeks on end to put together. While she was not in class as much as I was, she was definitely working her butt off at home putting together these intense projects... my longest assignments were the lab write-ups and studying for exams. I would have died having to do those projects, but she really enjoyed it. I am not creative so it would have just been frustrating for me. Plus she had to learn all about building codes and inspection guidelines and regulations and she had to learn about architecture and be able to draw a building from the ground up and design it. It was definitely an intense major with a lot of busy work. She admitted that it wasn't as intellectually challenging as science courses are but I admitted that it took a lot of work and would have completed confused me.

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[BlackDog17]

I've definitely known some art/theater majors who truly worked their butts off for their degree. But the English/Literature/Philosphy types of majors? Not so much, at least at my school.

It definitely depends on the student too though. The business school at my undergrad is the perfect example. I've always maintained that there are two very distinct types of business students. There are the students who are business majors because they are genuinely interested in it - they never miss a class, work hard, have great GPAs, are officers in whatever clubs they happen to be in, many of them dress to the nines every single day, and they're just generally very professional, upright sort of people. Then there's the other type of business student - the ones who are only business majors because the university told them they couldn't be "undeclared" any more. They go out drinking 5 nights a week, show up to maybe one class a week, spend the whole lecture texting or on Facebook, wear the same pair of cruddy sweatpants every day, and scrape by with C's and D's because they know they just have to pass - not excel - to graduate. These are the grossly stereotypical college students that everyone else hates.

I have yet to meet a business student here who does not fit perfectly into this dichotomy.

 

[CanHardlyWait]

I have nothing but respect for our design/art students at my undergrad. The amount of hours you guys put in is obscene. I definitely classify that differently than social science/humanity majors... which I was a double major in and can definitely say took way less time than science work (although was very differently rewarding!)

Hey now, don't undervalue the work of all humanities. I have a classics (and bio) degree and spent hours nearly daily my senior year translating text from Latin, and writing very long research papers on complicated topics like the pastoral history of pre-ancient Greece, a time period for which there are no written records. That meant analyzing archeological data like land use at sites and bone/teeth deposition of sheep/lambs at those sites, in addition to reading translated ancient texts on the subject and trying to differentiate myth from fact, based on available history and context of/on the author etc... Not easy stuff!
All the while taking organic chem and upper levels bios. Just saying...

 

[Trilt]

Hey now, don't undervalue the work of all humanities. I have a classics (and bio) degree and spent hours nearly daily my senior year translating text from Latin, and writing very long research papers on complicated topics like the pastoral history of pre-ancient Greece, a time period for which there are no written records. That meant analyzing archeological data like land use at sites and bone/teeth deposition of sheep/lambs at those sites, in addition to reading translated ancient texts on the subject and trying to differentiate myth from fact, based on available history and context of/on the author etc... Not easy stuff!
All the while taking organic chem and upper levels bios. Just saying...

Not trying to undervalue! I was a philosophy double major and some of my upper level philosophy courses were definitely way, way more intellectually difficult (truly involving hard thinking, not just rote memorization). But I'd still have to say that in just pure time spent on classes/labs/everything, my biology degree was significantly more time intensive. Mileage may vary depending on school/degree, of course!

 

[CanHardlyWait]

Not trying to undervalue! I was a philosophy double major and some of my upper level philosophy courses were definitely way, way more intellectually difficult (truly involving hard thinking, not just rote memorization). But I'd still have to say that in just pure time spent on classes/labs/everything, my biology degree was significantly more time intensive. Mileage may vary depending on school/degree, of course!

Ok, I see what you are saying. I agree you spend way more time in class in the sciences, mainly cuz of all of the labs. But total time spent, I spent way more time working on classics and Latin. Just like you said, cuz it's not something I could memorize. I had to think and work, then think some more, then more work But then, I declared an interest in classics late in my education, and was a bit out of my league, having been previously solely focused on science. Compared to my fluent in both Greek and Latin counterparts in the department, I was always playing catch up.

And whoa, philosophy, way out of my league