You have probably heard once, twice, or multiple times the general complaint by architecture students; they don’t get enough sleep. They keep working hard all the time. Nonetheless, their work can be regarded by other majors as “easy” or “trivial.” Well, get ready for the facts that will put things straight. Architecture students were right!
A study by Indiana University’s National Study of Student Engagement (NSSE) for 2016 confirms the fact that architecture students are the ultimate hard-workers, with an average of 22.2 hours per week of outside-class work. The study was a result of a survey conducted by the NSSE among thousands of American students.
The architecture students’ work varies between researching, planning, designing (and that’s a lot of thinking), drawing, revising, calculating, rendering, presenting, and so on. It is a series of operations that need to be repeated for every single project. No wonder, they came on top of the list. The three following places were taken by engineering students from three different majors, with average studying hours between 19.66 – 18.82 hours/week. Fine and Applied Arts students came much later, at the 24th place, with an average of 16.52 studying hours per week, and that, well enough, debunks the myth that Architecture and Fine/Applied arts are almost the same.
You can see the complete stats by Indiana University’s NSSE as presented to The Tab, in the figure below. The figure shows the average studying hours per week for more than 80 majors. Click on the image below for more details