Preterm at SAIS. Is it worth it?

[chrisbcreme]

Hello everybody.

I'll be attending SAIS this fall, and wanted to get some perspective from any current students on preterm. Logistically, it doesn't make that much sense for me to do preterm, but it seems that they strongly encourage students to attend. I don't have any econ background and I'm going to have to take 4 semesters of language courses during my two years there, so there is a benefit to taking a required core course while there. Is there a significant added benefit to doing preterm in terms of clearing core courses out of the way and getting into the loop socially, or is it relatively unimportant in the scheme of things?

[jpa]

Hey,

A college friend of mine, who's now a 2nd yr was an econ major. She highly recommended that I take Micro during pre-term and try to test out of Macro, saying that Micro was really hard to test out of. She said it helped her get back into the school mode, especially being out of school for a few years. She told me not to take both, because it'll just kill me before school starts and I should make an effort to make friends as well during that time.

Another friend, who will be entering his 2nd year, told me to attend pre-term and not to test out of the econ as it'll help me later, because I have been out of school for the last 4 years. He majored in econ as well.

I'm not sure if it really matters if you had an econ background or not (I majored in it), but I think the consensus is that it'll free up hours later, so you can take other more interesting classes and it'll help you with the adjustment. I also plan on taking languages classes every semester, so it's nice to get rid of one requirement. Oh and they both said that SAIS designs the econ classes so that everyone succeeds, knowing many people didn't have a background in econ.

Hope that helps?