Schedule

Other Mudder bloggers have been posting their assorted schedules. Mine's actually going to be pretty typical for a frosh changing majors to CS.

As a background note, Mudd has a core curriculum. Most students have finished it by the end of sophomore year. The core schedule is quite nice the summer before freshman year, when your friends are all talking about having to rush to their school's website to sign up for classes before they all fill up. Core classes take up progressively less time in your schedule as you go through more of the curriculum and help you figure out what you want to major in.

• Electricity, Magnetism, and Optics (abbreviated as E&M): The final core physics class. I'm also taking the associated lab for this class.
  
• Multivariable Calculus II & Introduction to Probability and Statistics: Core math classes, half a semester each.
  
• Introduction to Computer Science. I decided near the end of March that I wanted to major in CS, so I'm taking the first non-core CS class.
  
• Discrete Mathematics. This is a requirement for CS majors, but is also reputed to be quite a fun math class.
  
• Dickens, Hardy, and the Victorian Age. This is the unusual class in my schedule. Every 2 years, Professors Groves (a literature professor) and Eckert (a Physics professor) teach a class that consists of reading, discussing, and writing about books written by Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. The class culminates in a trip to England over the second half of winter break.

This is a pretty normal schedule for a third semester: it contains the core Physics class (and its lab), two half-semester core math classes, a class in a major I'm seriously considering, a humanities class, and a fifth class.

Common variations on the third-semester schedule:

• Some freshmen take the rest of the core math program over the summer, opening up 3 hours of space(an average class) in their schedule. Most of them fill that space with a technical elective.
  
• The "fifth class" is STEMS, the core engineering class. Most of the people who do this are engineers, because STEMS is a prerequisite for a lot of engineering classes.
• The "fifth class" is the required Biology class. This frees up 3 hours of space in the spring.
• The "fifth class" is a Humanities class. People who do this are usually taking E&M and two difficult technical classes. Whether or not this actually decreases your workload is debatable, but it does give you more space in your week wherein you're not doing problem sets.