Academic rigor is an undeniable part of my Hopkins life. You spend more time on M-Level with the disheveled looking security guards than you do in your room. You look forward to Saturdays because you can spend an entire day in the library, without being interrupted by classes. Your definition of the "walk of shame' is walking from the library to the Hut at two in the morning. If this is you, chances are you are overloading, or are at least considering it.
You have decided that five classes just don't challenge you enough, plus you are trying to graduate with two majors and a minor in three years, so you had better get cracking.
Overloading is officially defined as taking more than 16.5 credits for those people not taking a language, and 17.5 if you are taking a language. Students are only authorized to do this if they earned a 3.5 GPA or higher in the semester prior to the semester in which they are trying to overload. And yes, there is much Hopkins red tape involved in this process.
The steps involved for someone trying to overload are as follows: first, you have to get authorized from the professor of the course by getting his signature on those little yellow slips. Then you go to Academic Advising on the third floor of Garland, wait for about six months to get an appointment with your advisor, and get him or her to sign it. Finally, after waiting for 20 minutes to get one of the ladies who work in the registrar's office to pay attention to you, you can finally declare yourself JHopped.
Overloading has become more common among students recently because of the increased summer tuition fees. This summer, for a three-credit class you will be spending $1,620, or for a four-credit course, $2,160. Then you have to cover housing as well, which generally comes out to about $600 a month. This means that if you want to take two courses this summer, you could end up spending about $4,500.
This is clearly an incredible amount of money when you could just take those two courses over the school year, overloading with one course each semester. In this circumstance, overloading sounds like an excellent option.
Overloading, however, has its drawbacks. Often, five courses alone can be troubling enough, no matter whether your major is biomedical engineering, international relations or biology. Hopkins classes are undeniably difficult and the graduation requirements were designed so that a student entering Hopkins with no credits would be able to graduate in four years by taking 15 credits, or five classes, each semester.
It's four years, times two semesters, meaning eight semesters, times 15 credits, which adds up perfectly to 120, the number of credits required to graduate. So, the question is, why overload?
My story is one of too much ambition. I am a political science and economics double major, minoring in business and trying to graduate a year early. I decided to try overloading this semester by adding Professor Ball's Monetary Analysis course. I ran into the same conflict many of you most likely will when trying to take six courses all centered around the same subject matter: scheduling conflicts. Hopkins is infamous for scheduling classes which students would likely take together.
Therefore, I have two different class conflicts involving three different classes, but by talking to the professors, they have agreed to let me leave early for some classes, arrive late to others, and on certain days miss class entirely.
While I have been fortunate enough not to have these conflicts affect my grade significantly, I would not recommend this practice. It can be extremely difficult to account for information which you missed during one class session, let alone missing the same class every week.
When overloading, ensure that you don't have scheduling conflicts, and if you do, ensure that the material you will miss is in classes where the lecture notes either don't matter or are all posted online.
Hopefully, I have given you a more thorough grasp of the overloading process at Hopkins. While it sounds fun and interesting, or completely pointless and unexciting, it is by no means a simple task. Thus I offer the following advice. Overload if you want to really challenge yourself. Overload if that one course you are dying to take is only being offered this semester. Overload if that one professor absolutely loves you and you know you will get an A, since it's an easy course anyway. Overload if it's the only way you can graduate in time with everything you want to do.
Short of these reasons, evaluate your desire to overload, make a cost-benefit analysis, and you might realize that it won't hurt to relax a bit. Maybe you can even graduate without being JHopped.
