I took five classes a school term, and this is what happens
- williammarcvs
- Jan 11
- 16 min read
Last quarter, I took five classes, totaling 20 out of 21 units for a term, and it was a trainwreck in terms of the amount of studying and the sacrifices I’ve had to make to see what happened this quarter. So, if you’re considering taking five classes a quarter at your college/university, this article may be the one for you. However, I don’t recommend this article if you’re just starting at university. And this article is primarily for students at a university with a quarter system, where students take three terms a year, with an additional term for summer sessions. I said this because five classes a term may have different implications, especially for those in a semester system. So, I should explain to you what a quarter is.
I’m currently a third-year electrical engineering student at the University of California, Los Angeles. However, I’ll refer to the university as UCLA because it’s quite mouthful, and the university uses the quarter system. The quarter system typically runs for about 11 weeks, with no dead week (a week with no classes, intended for studying), and a year is divided into 4 quarters, though students only need to take 3 (like me). Because it’s shorter than the typical semester system, teachers teach the classes faster and with less depth.
If you know me, I’ve been previously a Linguistics and Computer Science student (the major actually existed at UCLA, so it’s not a double major). Still, I’ve switched because of differing academic passions so that I can take up to 21 units instead of the usual 19. The classes I took for the fall quarter 2025 were PHYSICS 1C, 4BL, EC ENGR 3, 102, and a general education class, ART HIS 22, totaling 20 units. PHYSICS 1C was optics, relativity, and expansions of magnetic and electric fields, circuits, and PHYSICS 4BL was mainly an application of those concepts. EC ENGR 3 was an introductory class, and EC ENGR 102 was a signals and systems class, basically another math class. And the art history class, ART HIS 22, covered early modern European art.
I took five classes this quarter to see if I can handle the workload to graduate on time. When I switched to electrical engineering, I missed all the electrical engineering classes because I didn’t have to take them at the time. So, I have a lot of catching up to do. Also, I would like the option to take six classes so that graduate school applications will be easier next year. I knew that it would require a lot of time to study. Now you may be wondering what’s up with the thumbnail for Thursday’s schedule.
Thursday's schedule was chaos and couldn't believe what happened.
Thursday’s schedule for the quarter was just chaos because it took up a lot of my mental energy in each class, leaving me tired. It spanned from 8 am to 8 pm with a bunch of classes being back-to-back. It started with EC ENGR 3 lecture, ART HIS 22 discussion, PHYSICS 1C lecture, PHYSICS 4BL lab, and after around 2 hours, an EC ENGR 102 lecture. Both electrical engineering lectures had slides posted just before class, and I was either on the phone or doing homework for other classes. Next was my art history discussion, which included announcements of upcoming assignments (there weren't many), discussions of readings assigned beforehand, and lots of comparisons between artworks. The physics lecture has a life of its own, and I haven’t appreciated much of it. I’ll explain it after going through the classes. Lastly, before the EC ENGR 102 lecture, I have a physics lab, and all we do is work on assigned labs with a teaching assistant assisting.
What I’m saying is that the schedule for a day is atrocious. And the worst part of it is that it’s the first day (for no practical reason other than hubris) and it’s probably the last real day. My schedule for the quarter was: a big class on Mondays and Thursdays, second on Tuesdays, and Wednesdays and Fridays extremely chill.
Mondays start with a 2-hour lab for EC ENGR 3. It was the start of week 1, and the professor would introduce some concepts for the lab, though students, including me, must complete an assignment related to the lab before the lab began. Luckily, the lab was super easy, though it took a long time to complete, and my lab partner and I have doubts about it. After that class, I had about 5 hours of break, which I used for lunch and further studying. After those 5 hours, I attended a PHYSICS 1C discussion with a teaching assistant, who brought a sheet of practice problems, supposedly similar to the exam problems. For now, there was a set of problems supposedly based on concepts covered before the lecture. Almost right after the discussion, I attended an art history lecture, and that was it for Monday.
Tuesdays were like Thursdays, but I don’t have an EC ENGR 3 lecture and an ART HIS 22 discussion. Wednesdays were just ART HIS 22 lecture, and I have no class on Fridays (I used to have a discussion but it's cancelled).
So my schedule has two heavy days with the rest being quite chill. Let me go through a rundown of all the classes of fall 2025: PHYSICS 1C, ART HIS 22, EC ENGR 102, EC ENGR 3, and PHYSICS 4BL.
I took PHYSICS 1C with a professor known for teaching lower-division physics (at UCLA, lower-division classes are the ones without the three digits) and for unintentionally spurring fear among engineering students, like me. The lectures were the strong suit for the professor, in which the professor carried chalk, notes, and started drawing physics concepts. For students interested in physics, the professor’s stories and knowledge of each physics concept intrigued students, but not me. The professor wrote notes clearly, but never recorded the lectures. And the assignments were something interesting.
The physics homework was so meaningless that the professor had all of the homework assignments due a couple of days before the final exam. It used an online textbook and a portal that hosted the homework. The homework consisted of about 10-12 problems, ranging from easy to hard. The easy issues were basically plug-and-chug, but the challenging problems were quite varied. The complicated problems were somewhat like the exam problems, but sometimes weren’t, because the professor didn't read the textbook. Some complex problems were primarily calculation-based, but the ones I found, like the exam problems, don’t contain many numbers and require a much deeper understanding of the concepts to attempt them. In fact, the professor would explain what makes his teaching different from the textbook. For me, I completed an entire chapter's worth of homework, usually like one ahead of a physics lecture, so that the exams wouldn't throw concepts at me I hadn’t learned.
In week 4 of the quarter, the first physics midterm was held. Granted, the physics professor said they must study using first principles, breaking a problem down into its components and figuring it out from there. The midterm contained only two issues, but they were divided into different sections. The midterm examinations have no numbers, and we cannot use notes, phones, or calculators. The problem descriptions consisted of a couple of known things, just enough for me to solve a problem, plus having them consist of multiple topics woven together. Immediately, I had no idea how to start addressing any of the issues. The first problem involved a magnetic field, and the professor apparently worded it weirdly. So I pulled in some Ampere’s law stuff and called it a day, even though it made no sense in retrospect. The second problem dealt with RLC circuits (resistors, inductors, capacitors), which I didn’t study. I actually didn’t do any practice because it apparently involved chapters that I thought wouldn’t be covered before, like after the first midterm exam. It lasted 50 minutes, and the best part of the exam was that I could write anything literally.
The median and the mean for this exam were about 50%-60%. To get an A in the course, you need to score a standard deviation above the median, with a raw score of D at a minimum. I scored around a standard deviation below the median and the mean, devastating. Granted, the professor didn’t claim to fail anyone, and I should have been able to pass at the time. All the other professors I’ve had have averaged around 70%, basically a raw passing grade. The unfortunate thing about the course was that the professor refused to release exam solutions, and you had to attend a TA discussion section to get them explained. In fact, when I attended the first physics midterm, the TA didn’t have the problems on hand, didn’t feel the need to draw each problem, and didn’t write the solutions for each statement. It was like all the parts of one problem and barely anything for another. I was so confused that, several weeks later, I attended one of the TA office hours specifically to review the first midterm.
Although I was determined to rescue my physics grade, the path forward proved challenging. I didn’t know whether the amount of physics homework I’ve completed would be sufficient for the exams I'm taking. When I attend a physics lecture, I go on Bruinwalk to read physics professor reviews, then on Reddit to figure out exactly what I struggled with. And when I leave every physics lecture and head into the lab, I feel defeated. I was worried that I might not pass the class. Not to mention, I cannot attend a single office hour session with the professor, since there are too many students crowded into a small office. Based on experience, since I took another physics class before dropping it quite late, the room for office hours wasn’t huge, but it had a lot of students, to the point that some were standing outside the room.
The second physics midterm was like the first, but I did worse on it. It didn’t help that a friend from a fellowship group invited me to a review session for this particular exam. Although the friend felt calm and ended up doing worse than I did on the midterm, I felt imposter syndrome about not being able to pass the class at all. It changed when the exam results were released. I got about 50-60%, with an average of 40%, nearly a standard deviation above the median. The exam scores gave me the confidence to pass. The only problem was that I had to start studying in week 8, and the exam was the first final exam of the quarter.
Physics final exam was the one, where my score was, in raw terms, the worst. I was not happy that the physics final was the first on this list, because it’s doubled the length of the physics midterms, and the exam was 3 hours long. The extra time did allow for more thorough problem-solving, but it didn’t help me much, for some reason. More studying could definitely help, but the topics require a level of study at a pace too demanding for a lower-division course. The problems in the exam weren’t anything special, but I didn’t seem to do too well on them. I knew I had no idea what to do on one of the problems. The common theme for this exam was that the topics expanded beyond what I actually studied, and I learned them at least 2 weeks in advance. I’m definitely sure an A was impossible, but anything but a D would be doable. In the end, I did score above average, and the teaching assistants found my approaches good enough to award me full points on some random parts of the problems, including the one on which I had no idea what to work on. I had a day without a final after my physics exam and spent most of it studying for other finals.
I want to talk about ART HIS 22, since it was a weird class. I chose the class because I like art and I like history. But what I got was extremely weird. Going into the lecture, the professor has the slides and keeps talking. The professor wasn’t coherent in the speeches with a bunch of “umms” while talking on the slides. Sure, the professor memorized a script to avoid looking at the slides too often, but it seemed like there was a disconnect. Like I haven’t got much valuable information that other sources didn’t mention already. It’s interesting: since there were quite a few students and there wasn’t mandatory attendance at the lectures, I went to too many of them for the information to be valuable.
Besides the lectures, there were discussions, a podcast project, a midterm exam, and a final exam.
The art history midterm was an exam consisting of 2 compare-and-contrast essays, each aimed at developing a theme based on details from the artworks or related to art, such as architecture. The professor wanted students to write two essays in about an hour and 30 minutes with a provided exam book. The professor would have two artworks on one slide and another two on another slide, separated by about 30 minutes. I don’t have to memorize the artwork, but I do need to understand the cultural context to identify its details better and explain the artists' intentions to viewers. The questions seemed quite new to me. I only take notes on basically every artwork that might be for the midterm. I didn’t write mock essays and have them reviewed by a teaching assistant for some sort of review. So when I took the art history exam, I started writing a 5-paragraph essay, like the ones I always did back in high school. Have a background, make a thesis, provide supporting arguments for the thesis, and write a conclusion. It worked in high school, but it was pretty useless in retrospect. It wasn’t that useless, but there wasn’t much need for a background, and the arguments I’ve supported didn’t have much to back them up, at least for some of them. I didn’t have enough time to write much else besides the 30 minutes left for the essay. I did okay on the exam, and I got a B-.
The art history podcast was a short interview with a friend about an artwork or something approved. Before the podcast, I had to propose the project for approval, even though there was no indication of approval. The good thing was that I chose an approved piece of artwork, actually a facade of a building in Italy. The only thing I’ve received is comments from my teaching assistant asking me to align with the proposal's specifications, but the information was still good.
For the podcast, the first thing I did was write a script based on the proposal and ask a friend to read it. The time limit was 5 minutes, and I can write about 500-800 words. So, I vomited about 600 words and wrote evidence to help support them. I initially cited them as in a standard essay, but later changed them because it would be for a podcast, and I must cite them explicitly. The art history professor announced the podcast and the proposal assignments in week 5 of the quarter, so I spent the rest of the time editing them before asking a friend to record with me. I ended up asking a roommate to record with me because I thought that most of my other friends weren’t available. I did one take and called it a day.
The art history final exam came around, and I felt like nothing. It felt similar to the midterm exam for art history and not much else. The best part of the final exam was that it was over before I knew it, and that was it. The worst part of the exam was that it was my last exam of the quarter, and I had to prepare for it. Before the exam, I attended one of the review sessions, where the professor brought in examples and had students discuss the artworks' details and general themes. Although I got a lot out of it, it didn’t help me study for less than 12 hours for the final. Back then, I just gotten out of the EC ENGR 102 final, and although my classmates and I walked down in celebration, they were planning to have fun, while I had a final to do. So, I spent the rest of the time taking notes on each piece of artwork, and I got it down in about 3 hours. It’s like the midterm exam for the class, but with much less time. I actually have no clue what I got on the final exam. Yeah, I’m glad the exam was over.
Let’s talk about EC ENGR 102, signals and systems.
EC ENGR 102 lectures were pretty useless, though I attended them because participation points and the professor occasionally awarded extra credit. The homework felt like math problems with little resemblance to electrical engineering, aside from the concepts. Although I get perfect scores on the math problems, I usually don’t in EC ENGR 102, and I didn’t mind. Some parts of the homework contain Python segments, but they were easy since they’re trying to demonstrate math concepts visually.
The signals and systems midterm worked a lot like the homeworks, spanning multiple topics up to the week before the midterm. I don’t have much to say about the midterm other than I didn’t study enough for it. It didn’t matter, though, because I believed I could do better on the final exam and because the final exam was replacing the midterm exam. If you’re curious, I got a D. I hoped I'd get an A on the final.
Although I did about as badly on the signals and systems midterm as I did in physics, I didn’t feel so bad about it.
The final exam was a day before my art history final, which was like the midterm, and I was taking it basically after the EC ENGR 3 final exam. After the electrical engineering final exam, my lab partner and I went to a building around the life science building, which we call very south of campus because of the presence of health-related buildings, plus Ronald Reagan Hospital. Unfortunately, my lab partner was still struggling to grasp most of the concepts in signals and systems, particularly the Fourier transform. We reviewed the majority of the problems from a past final, and I read through some more. We only have around 30 minutes to review so that it wouldn’t change much.
And then came the final exam. I didn’t remember much about the final exam, except that there was a part of a problem that took like an hour, and I still couldn’t get it. It was trying to find a series of Fourier coefficients for some functions or something. My work was very convoluted, and I genuinely thought the answers didn’t make sense. But after the final exam, I have a massive problem. My classmates and I went down to the dorm to reflect on the signals-and-systems final exam. They were planning to play games, and I have less than 12 hours before my next final exam. And I haven’t studied that in full yet. It was 9:30 p,m and the chances of finding dining spots were slim. I went to a takeout spot and wrote notes for the last final. I wrote notes for about 5 hours.
The other class I want to talk about was EC ENGR 3, which took quite a lot out of me, given the amount of work for an introductory class. The homework and the labs weren’t harmful, but they can be time-consuming. The homework was just one problem, and the labs consisted of demonstrating some electrical engineering principles. The quizzes were like homework, but I could only use a calculator. Though I didn’t do as well on the quizzes as on the homeworks, it was my fault, and I wanted to focus on upper-division courses.
There was one assignment that took the majority of my emotions, the final project. The electrical engineering final project consisted of building a car that used sensors to navigate a course with a couple of bobby traps, like a black bar and a doughnut, a sharp turn, and dead-end intersections. The main problem was trying to complete the track, especially since I gaslighted my lab partner into using a steering wheel (with keybinds) to control the vehicle. The main issue was that adjusting the sensors was weird. The best way to properly test it was to rewrite the sensors and hope for the best, literally, and to constantly wait for the turn. I have to diagnose the problem and have some forcing conditions to get it working. However, I got the car to work too well, almost passing the entire thing. At least I can work on all the other portions of the track, and those were easy. When I got to test in the lab, it almost succeeded, getting a 99/100. But my lab partner found that any attempts to perfect it weren’t worth the stress coming from the effort and the number of classes for the quarter.
I didn’t study much for the final exam because the EC ENGR 102 final exam was more critical for my graduate admissions program. But I thought I was confident enough to score relatively high on the exam, except for some parts of the Thevenin equivalent circuits stuff. For all exams going forward, they’re similar to the ones based on the midterms. The weird thing about the exam was that there were only a couple of conceptual questions, with the rest being calculation-based problems that applied various concepts developed in quizzes. There was this one problem based on differential equation-type stuff about inductors and finding the initial conditions, and I was struggling quite hard to figure out where actually to start. I found some weird answers that didn’t make sense. I had a lab partner taking the exam, and he saw the same problem. There were some issues with the final exam. The exam wasn’t entirely well-printed, and one question gave away the answer, though I solved it without knowing it.
Lastly, I took PHYSICS 4BL to complete my five classes for fall 2025. The class was basically light work because the labs were in groups, and as long as the groups worked on the task, I’m confident I'll get at least an A in the class. The pre-labs weren’t complex, but at times they were time-consuming, so I went to office hours for help.
The final project was a mess because my group struggled to draft a proper proposal for a suitable project. We had to make another proposal, which was dumber than our first due to a lack of resources to make the project happen. Once we got the project approved, we spent several weeks gathering the frequencies and brainstorming ideas. We were on a time bomb, basically brainstorming remotely anything relevant for the upcoming presentation. I’m pretty sure that was the issue. But we completed the project, gave a pretty bad presentation with an alright report, and called it a day.
Those were my five classes, and, based on my analysis, one of them was the only truly easy one. One, I could have put more effort into EC ENGR 3, but PHYSICS 1C took way more effort than necessary for the exam because the professor included challenging problems. And ART HIS 22 was an unnecessarily burdensome class and, at times, nonsensical because of those exams. The only class I found to be relatively easy was EC ENGR 102. Because I took these five classes, after finishing my last final, I was done for the quarter and went home.
A couple of weeks later, grades were out, except for physics, due to some system issues. The first thing I realized was that the grades for some classes came out better than expected. The art history, systems, and signals classes gave me pretty high grades. The rest came out just as expected, including physics.
So what did I learned from taking five classes a quarter? The workload was terrible, but it wasn’t as awful as I thought. But since I have to graduate on time, I may continue taking five classes for a while. If the five classes had gone better than expected, then I would chill out with only three classes a quarter.
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