Some students who have survived six classes call the experience a manageable challenge.

“I think people overestimate the difficulty of taking six classes, really,” organismic and evolutionary biology concentrator Nicolas Maffey ’13 says, completely serious. “If you choose the right classes, it’s really doable.”

This semester, Maffey is enrolled in six courses—two Organismic and Evolutionary Biology classes, a global health class, a chemistry class, a psychology class, and an English class. He is also a varsity gymnast at MIT and president of the Harvard Organization for Latin America.

Before coming to Harvard, Maffey went to high school in Argentina, where he, like all of his classmates, took ten courses each semester.

“When I tell I my parents back home that I’m taking six courses, they don’t think it’s insane or anything,” Maffey says. “They just say, ‘cool.’”

Like Maffey, government and philosophy joint concentrator Theodora M. Skeadas ’12, who has enrolled in six classes the past three semesters, says she is able to balance a heavy workload with an active extracurricular and social life.

Limited to only 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, Skeadas says she found time to direct the PBHA program Mission Mentors, run regularly, practice yoga and meditation, and even go out on Friday and Saturday nights—all while still averaging eight hours of sleep every night.

She says this busy schedule has forced her to improve her time management skills, leading to better grades with six courses than she had earned with only four classes.

But Skeadas admits that there are limits to how much she can do.

“If you’re taking six classes and expecting to do all the reading for it, it’s not going to happen.”

LIFE OUT OF BALANCE

While some students emerge unfazed from a semester of six classes, others say they would never do it again.

Bakkila says that the semester he enrolled in six classes, he participated in essentially no extracurricular activities and cut back substantially on his social life. He also “worked consistently” through spring break.

“It was a semester of all work and no play,” Bakkila recalls.

When grades came out at the end of the semester, Bakkila anxiously waited to see if his semester of unyielding academic focus had paid off. His grades started to appear on the registrar’s website. The first five came in: A, A, A, A, A. After several agonizing days passed, finally the last grade appeared on the registrar’s website: A-.