WEIGHING WORKLOADS

Alumni compare college rigor and stress to their experiences at UPA

ARTICLE BY MATTHEW WALLACE • DESIGN & ILLUSTRATION BY CHLOE LUU

UPA’s mission statement describes its core goal as “[preparing] a diverse population of 7-12th grade students [...] to enter and excel in the best colother stuff in between. [The homework] really only took me four hours, but it felt like a lot longer [than college].” Amar Rama, a Class of 2015 alumnus, projects and presentation type finals, so it’s still worth a lot more of the grade compared to UPA, but it’s less stressful,” Jackson said. leges and universities in the nation.” In efforts to align with the mission, a number of teachers pride themselves in the rigor of their classes, assigning coursework comparable to or more difficult than college-level courses.

Sophia Chacko, a Class of 2016 alumna, noticed numerous discrepancies between what UPA taught about the college dynamic—like how professors interact with students and how which college someone attends affects their college experiences—and average college workloads.

“UPA taught me that college was going to be so much harder and it’s like something scary,” Chacko said, “but honestly, I think that there was a lot of fear put into students in high school.”

Chacko, who graduated from Seattle Pacific University in 2020, observed her college courses assigning less overall schoolwork than her classes at UPA.

“I would have a good 12 hours of homework to do for a class [per week], whereas in high school, it was a little bit more,” Chacko said.

Cynthia Jackson, a Class of 2018 alumna and current junior at Santa Clara University, realized that maturity gained since high school can make college work seem easier when comparing the time she spent on homework at each school.

“I was also very easily distracted in high school,” Jackson said. “[I worked for] a couple hours doing homework while doing found the structure of college gave him more freedom to manage his time. “When everything’s up to me, a lot of the times I end up just spending less time on it, so [the added freedom] is not always a bad thing,” Rama said. Chacko compared upper division lab classes in college, where all assignments are given at the beginning of the term and due by midterms, to AP classes at UPA, where the pacing of assignments is decided by teachers. “In terms of the layouts of [college] classes, the intensity is very similar to the AP classes,” Chacko said. “It’s just the timeline of that intensity that was different.” After graduating from California State University, Chico, in 2019, Rama realized the concentration of overall stress throughout a term in college differs from the concentration of stress at UPA. “The more stressful times [at college] can definitely be worse than at UPA and the less stressful times can be a lot better than at UPA,” Rama said. Throughout college, Jackson has experienced the highest and lowest points of stress. “Throughout the quarter it’s not as stressful [as at UPA] until you hit midterms,” Jackson said, noting the finals she took in college differ from the mostly testbased finals she took at UPA. “For psych majors, we do more group In his experience studying for five college-level AP classes and studying for college exams, Rama discovered that the two types of exams were similar in terms of difficulty. “I would definitely study five-plus hours for a [college] final or midterm,” Rama said. “[AP classes] were probably like five hours per class.” However, the rigor of UPA classes has its advantages, as after taking AP classes, Chacko was able to take fewer general education classes in college. “I was able to double major because I didn’t take a lot of my Gen Ed classes [in college] because a lot of them were fulfilled from the AP classes that I took,” Chacko said. Chacko also reflected that UPA teaches students what college level work is like and good study habits needed for college. After graduating college, Chacko realized her experiences at UPA provided non-academic benefits that became especially useful during her transition from UPA to college. “Navigating the changes of college and moving away from home to a new state, there was an added stress, for sure,” Chacko said, “but I think if I didn’t have the foundation that I got from UPA, then that transition would have definitely been harder.”