As an incoming freshman, I was very worried at the start of the year that I would not be able to keep up academically in college. Colorado College has such an amazing academic reputation, and I was wrought with fear that it would be too much to handle. Coming from a large public high school, I was accustomed to honors and AP classes, but I just did not know how I would fare. Today, I hope to assuage your fears, and give you the details on the homework load for this “West In Time” requirement-fulfilling FYE.
HY 104 is definitely a reading-heavy course. On average, every night I have about 2-4 hours of reading. The weekends have brought about six hours of homework total. The readings for this class have been a mix of literature, non-fiction research papers, scientific articles, historical accounts, primary sources, and even plays. The wide variety of reading material is great! I have found that if one reading assignment is not especially exciting to me, the next night’s material is.
While reading, I usually take detailed notes in a separate notebook. Many of my classmates have chosen to write in the textbooks, but I prefer to keep my thoughts and the actual text separate. I have found it helpful to include chapter plot summaries, thick questions, notes on character motivation, and bullet points of main ideas in my notebook about the material. Keeping notes on each reading has helped me sort out my thoughts, and also aids in remembering discussion topics in class.
So far, we have only had one essay. It was five pages and analyzed Greek conceptions of human power. We just got our essays back, and I plan on doing a separate post about our first college essay. For your own reference, it took me about ten hours to write the essay from start to finish. This time included the help that I received from Susan during her office hours, and a trip to the Writing Center.
We have nine books that we each had to purchase (which cost me about $140 total by the way), and Susan tells us that we will use them all over the course of this class. We have also used many online articles and documents. So far, we have read through three of our books almost in their entirety. While that may seem like a lot, it has been very manageable for me. It is also nice that we do not have to worry about another class. The Block Plan has been working out nicely for me in that way.
In conclusion, I have found that the homework load has been very manageable in this course. I will most likely do an update/final thoughts post on this topic towards the end of Block 2.
Thank you so much for reading, and I will write again soon.
-Nila
