For all we know, she will end up with a humanities as her top choice, and we won't even have to worry about difficulty :P
I don't think this really captures the spirit of these classes.
I wouldn't assume that writing, literature, or social science courses aren't going to have large amounts of material to learn or that they will be easy just because they aren't STEM courses.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to say that non-STEM courses are easy, because they do both take significant amounts of work, but I still personally believe that half the battle with STEM courses is understanding the topics, while in Humanities, learning the material might be kind of difficult, but it is the reading and writing and applying this that is the real challenge- but reading and writing are never impossible. In STEM, sometimes material just "doesn't make sense". I'm not saying this will happen to DD, but she naturally feels less apprehensive going into a Humanities course, knowing that she may get some hard assignments, but that with hard work, she can be very successful, instead of the apprehension of "what if I don't understand something and can't ever get caught up?" that may precede a science or math course.
Thanks for the review of the program, though! We are probably signing up in the next days, as applications are supposed to go up tomorrow.
Also, does anyone know about the Duke TiP Institutes? They look really cool, but they certainly don't have the 700 facebook fan groups that you can find for the Summer Studies programs, in fact, I've not found one review of them.
