Carleton College Admissions

You can give yourself a brain hemorrhage if you try, or you can arrange things so that you can coast. On average, it's rigorous.

Academic life is taken seriously at Carleton, but I appreciate most that we're not competitive about academic achievement. Everyone at Carleton is great at something, your motivation to do better is personal, and professors have a stake in your success. People work hard, but also know when to to have fun.

I like the diversity of class choices because I have so many different interests. It can be stressful at times, but learning to manage your time wisely is an important skill to learn.

Academic life at Carleton is rigorous. What separates it from being the same kind of daunting "rigorous" as in high school is that you have a lot of time to do the work. Most classes meet on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. This means that you often have all of Tuesday and Thursday to complete an assignment. Only taking three classes means that you can only have three classes worth of work to do, which is great compared to the 5 or 6 classes in high school. Also, having classes spread out over the day allows you to do work at different times. The fact that classes are only 10 weeks means that you start right away and go at a steady pace. This might seem a little overwhelming at first, but it is not hard to keep up once you realize that you need to!

Academics is given high priority at Carleton. Terms get very busy with regular assignments. Students interact a lot with professors both inside and out of class.

Academic life is definitely time consuming. I've learned that while you don't have to do work all the time at Carleton, there is always SOMETHING you could be doing. Despite the workload, academics at Carleton seems to be a communal thing, where people are often working together to discuss readings, work on problems sets and write lab reports. The faculty here is also very supportive, and helpful in meeting with students outside of class to go over material.

Difficult. The professors know how intelligent the student body is, and they expect us to perform to that potential. However, they don't want to see any student fail, so they are always available to help.

Intense. Also, people don't keep their academic lives to themselves. They talk to their friends about the ideas they are learning about in class, and their friends talk back.

Carleton’s academic environment is very relaxed. We have a very rigorous academic curriculum, but students here are incredibly self-motivated, eliminating any competition often found at similar schools. I appreciate that my classmates want to learn for the sake of learning. I know some people who have audited classes because they want to learn about the material but can’t fit it into their schedule.

The ten-week [trimester] schedule is great for a lot of reasons. Taking only three classes at a time allows each class a lot more focus and intensity than my friends at schools who have four or five classes for fifteen weeks. Not only do we spend less time in class each week, but we get to reassess our academic interests and paths at three different points in the year, which is a privilege.

Overall, academic life here is measured. First week is relaxed and low-pressure, 5th week is a burst of library time for midterms, 7th week comes as a welcome break, and by 9th week, you probably aren't doing anything that doesn't involve work for classes. Of course, like anything else, your academic life is what you make of it. It's up to you to do the readings and engage yourself in class.

The difference at Carleton is, unlike my high school, everyone's doing it. For me, this makes all the difference: to know that I'm part of a community of people who are taking this seriously makes it so much easier for me to get motivated to do my own work. People make sacrifices in other (more fun) areas to finish their reading so they can engage in class discussion the next day. People are passionate and think critically and bounce ideas off each other in the classroom. And everyone is smart. It has less to do with competitiveness and more to do with curiosity and interest, which is a distinguishing feature of Carleton among the top schools in the country.

People take their academics very seriously here, and everyone has at least one subject that they really love. People are generally very engaged – there’s no one taking the class “just” to fulfill a requirement.