University of Notre Dame Top Questions

Academics are challenging, but I believe Notre Dame prepares the student body to strive for the best from the first year.

The academics at Notre Dame are, overall, fantastic. It has a great reputation and phenomenal job placement. Interactions with professors can be varied. I’ve had a professor who invited the whole class over for dinner, and another who made kids cry for asking stupid questions during office hours. However, regardless of demeanor, all the professors and very knowledgeable and most have good teaching styles. As far as classes go, you will work a lot, though this work may manifest itself in different ways. Science/engineering students will have more homework, whereas Arts and Letters students will have more reading and studying. No matter what your major, you will put some serious time in at the library.

My econ professor complained about how only Neoclassical economists won the Nobel Prize. He spent fall break promoting his book in England. I love most of my professors, but some suck. I went to dinner at a professor's house, and I would love to hang out with them more if everyone wasn't so busy. Students try to do well, but would probably do anything to help another student out, which I hear is not true of other schools at our academic caliber. The first year of studies makes you take classes in a wide range of subjects, which some people don't like, but I really enjoyed. One of my sciences was astronomy. My history was on revolutions. My art was a film class, where we watched movies straight from the Oscar Best Movie nominees, like Slumdog Millionaire, Avatar, the Hurt Locker, and other obscure movies that blew my mind. You're probably afraid of our theology and philosophy requirements, but only the first one is standard (and ND theology is way better than theology in high school if you went to a Catholic school) and there are tons of interesting options for the second. There's definitely room to take random classes that interest you besides your major, and adding a second major or minor is probably more common than not. Classes are hard, but worth it. If you have a chance of getting into Notre Dame, you've worked hard before. If you're not trying your hardest, what are you doing with your life? We also have plenty of time to have fun, so don't think this is torture. Everyone loves life here, except for finals week. Haha.

Stduents study pretty damn hard in Notre Dame. The library is full almost all the time.

The class are challenging but will be challenging and worth it. The class sizes are not terrible but it depends on what your major is and the type of class. The professors are very willing to help and enjoy talking to you.

Academics across the board at Notre Dame are strong. While there are jokes around campus about certain majors being easier than others, pretty much every program is fairly rigorous and well respected. It does seem to be generally true that the engineers, science majors and architects spend the most time on homework and studying, but this is a generalization and has many exceptions. Classes tend to be fairly small, with the exception of the early prerequisites in the most popular majors (i.e., general chemistry or intro to international relations). It isn't very difficult to get to know your professors, and most are willing to meet with you at length to discuss both your coursework and the professor's own research and academic interests. The university requires freshmen to take some "seminar" classes that are strictly limited in size, which guarantees that you will get to know at least a few of your professors very well very early in your college career. While the coursework can be challenging, classmates are eager to work together and you would easily be able to find a study group for virtually any class, if you're so inclined. The course offerings are generally pretty good, although it varies some from major to major. Some are more flexible than others in terms of having fewer requirements and more opportunity for electives. From my own personal experience, the political science program offered a lot of opportunities to take classes that appealed to me personally, and the faculty went way out of their way to continue adding new classes that responded to changing current events (for example, I was on campus for 9/11/01. By the start of spring semester that year, the political science department was already offering a new mini-course on terrorism and the changing national security environment).

Academics here are obviously top-notch. Due to the highly selective nature of admissions, everyone here is something of an intellectual. It's nice to be able to have an intelligent, academic discussion with anyone on campus, though no one is overly-pretentious about it. I've had far more good professors than bad professors. Outside of some large pre-req classes, this isn't a college where you're getting four more years of high school classes. Probably around half of my classes have had 20 people or less, which is really nice. I'm a film major, and even though ND isn't really known for film, our department is awesome. We have some really great professors, lots of course options, and I know most of the majors in my class and the classes around me since it's not too big (nor too small). We have easy access to facilities and equipment that would be a pain to get in a larger film school since there would be so many students competing for the same stuff. We have class in an amazing new building, and everything is state of the art.

Academics are hard but worth it.

Academics are great. I have been in one class over 100 people, and its Psychology 101. All of my other classes have had between 15 and 40 people, which I love. Most professors are really eager to get to know you, but you have to make the effort. I had a professor who came to lunch in the student dining hall once a week to have lunch with his students. Although not typical, this is also not uncommon by any means.

Notre Dame focus is on undergraduates. That means there is undergraduate research available everywhere for science majors. As a sophmore I didn't know what I wanted to do for the summer. I simply asked my favorite teacher if there was room for a chemical engineering undergrad in his research group. He simply said yes and that was it. It is so easy to get a research job here. All my friends who wanted to do research have a research position here. The rest of my engineering friends have internships as sophmores. Professor's here are great and helpful. All of my professors know my name and I routinely talk to them outside of class. I have never had a class taught by a TA or someone that doesn't have a Ph.D. In the college of engineering students are extremely intelligent. The nice thing is that we are not competitive with each other. We are encouraged by our teachers to do our homework in groups. I always do my homework sets in a group of at least 4 people. It typically takes 2 to 4 hours to solve 1 problem in chemical engineering and most problem sets have 4 to 5 problems. So doing the homework sets in groups to split of the workload is extremely helpful because it reduces the time taken on homework greatly.