Missy Franklin, who won six gold medals at the 2013 world championships in Barcelona, Spain, competes in her first home meet with her University of California swimming team against Washington State earlier this season.

BERKELEY, Calif. — The strain showed on Missy Franklin’s face as she lay on her back, scissoring her straight legs a few inches off the ground as painstakingly as a seamstress cutting a pattern. Franklin’s strong core was obvious Friday well before she joined a dozen of her University of California swimming teammates in the afternoon for their weekly hourlong dance class, which, to their dismay, featured more segmental rotations than hip gyrations.

Franklin, the big freshman on campus, arranged her class schedule so she would have Fridays free to catch up on studying and sleep and the obligations that come with being the reigning queen of U.S. swimming. Her extra duties last week included sitting for a 25-minute interview for Brazilian television in advance of the 2016 Olympics and standing for five minutes of questions from the university’s online television station, CalTV. The news media sessions were arranged around morning and afternoon pool workouts, the dance class and a sociology study period.

“Thank you so much for working with my schedule,” she said after one interview. “It’s crazy.”

Two months removed from her record-setting, six-gold-medal performance at the world championships in Barcelona, Spain, Franklin is settling into a routine, which is refreshingly ordinary for an athlete of her stature, though far from normal.

Eschewing a personal entourage for teammates, and the lap of luxury for a twin bed in a dormitory, Franklin, 18, is the sweet antidote to star athletes in major sports who treat their college experience as a kind of purgatory, a time of suffering between high school and a lucrative professional career.

She turned down at least $1 million in endorsements so she could compete in college while working toward a bachelor’s degree in a field she has no clue how to divide.

“I have a double major,” she said, joking. “Undecided and undeclared.”

The workload is more challenging and exhausting than Franklin had imagined. With a laugh, she said, “I’ve learned that Berkeley is very hard.”

She added: “Classes are definitely kicking me in the butt. But I love it.”

It is no easier in the pool for Franklin, who won four gold medals as a 17-year-old at the 2012 London Olympics. One morning last week, Franklin and her teammates took a 30-minute spin class, then ran to the pool, then participated in a workout of all-out sprints.

“I’m getting my butt beat every day at practice,” she said. “I realize how much I have to learn.”

Swimming for nothing, hard knocks for free. It is the deal Franklin, who grew up in Colorado, signed up for when she accepted an athletic scholarship instead of a professional contract.

“Best decision I have ever made,” she said.

It is worth the homesickness she has experienced, being apart from her parents, Dick and D.A., and her dog, Ruger.

“That’s been hard for me to realize that I may not ever live with my parents again,” she said.

The ache goes both ways. Franklin’s father rarely missed her swim meets, and her mother never did. Their schedules have opened like a ribbon of highway through the heartland, but they have not hit the road yet to attend her first college meets.

“We want to give her space right now,” D.A. Franklin said in a phone interview.

When Franklin arrived in Berkeley in August, her parents’ main fear, allayed in a meeting with campus security, was that her high profile might put her in harm’s way. The Cal coaching staff’s main concern was to give her as normal a college experience as possible given that her baggage includes five Olympic medals, nearly 372,000 Twitter followers and one unofficial acting credit with Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn. (Her cameo in their film “The Internship” was cut.)

Franklin had her own nagging worry: How was she, an only child who had commandeered the entire second floor of her parents’ house outside Denver, possibly going to adapt to sharing a bedroom, a bathroom, and every square inch in between?

Of all the adjustments she has had to make, it proved the easiest. On Twitter, Franklin makes it sound as if she hit the roommate jackpot when she was assigned swimmer Kristen Vredeveld, a freestyler from Tennessee.

“My roommate is the best,” Franklin said.

Mealtimes, she said, are when she is asked most often for an autograph or picture. When Vredeveld sees someone approaching, she will chirp, “Teeth check!” It is Franklin’s cue to smile wider so Vredeveld can make sure no food is lodged between her teeth.

Franklin was in her dorm room last Sunday night with her boyfriend, Daniel Butler, a baseball pitcher at the University of San Francisco who is also from Colorado, and Vredeveld when the floor shuddered and the walls shook.

“We looked at each other like, ‘Uh, was that an earthquake?’ ” Franklin said. “Then we heard everyone coming out of their rooms and screaming in the hallway, and we were like, ‘Yeaaah!’ ”

By California standards, the quake, centered roughly 2 miles from campus with a magnitude of 3.1, was small. But it was a big deal to Franklin, who had never experienced one.

Her world has been gently rocked by other events that seem small to her but have shocked others. In her first home meet, Oct. 4 against Washington State, Franklin finished second in the 400-yard individual medley to her classmate Celina Li, who had also defeated her in a competition at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo last month on her way to being crowned Queen of the Pool.

It did not matter that Li is a world-class competitor in the individual medley, which is not Franklin’s specialty. After the Washington State meet, Franklin said, she was out with a group that included her teammates Elizabeth Pelton and Li, and someone said to Pelton: “I heard Missy Franklin lost today. Is it true?”

Li, who is from nearby Pleasanton, Calif., said, “When people come up to me and say, ‘You beat Missy Franklin,’ I don’t know how to react because she’s my teammate, she’s my friend.” She added, “I look up to Missy in so many ways already.”

Franklin said: “It’s hard because sometimes people don’t understand that I don’t do this to win every single race and also that I’m not going to win every single race. That’s all a part of this experience, learning and trying new events.”

The Bears, ranked third in the country behind Florida and Georgia, have a roster that is diving-well deep. It includes Pelton, a sophomore who set a U.S. record in the 200-yard backstroke en route to winning the NCAA title as a freshman, and Rachel Bootsma, another sophomore, who won the 100 backstroke by clocking the second-best time in short-course yards history behind former Cal standout Natalie Coughlin (Franklin is fourth).

Franklin owns the U.S. record in the 100-meter backstroke and the world record in the 200. She excels at long-course meters and less so in short-course yards, which involve extra turns, because walls are her Kryptonite.

“I was surprised at the amount of people that I had coming up to me,” Franklin said, “and saying: ‘College swimming, isn’t that going to be easy for you? Aren’t you going to kill everyone?’ I would look at them and say, I’m like the third- or fourth-slowest backstroker on my team.”

Cal coach Teri McKeever, who in 2012 guided the U.S. women’s squad to 14 Olympic medals, and her associate head coach, Kristen Cunnane, promote an attitude of appreciation. When the going gets tough, they encourage their swimmers to write down 10 things for which they are grateful.

Franklin could have been reading her list when she said: “It’s been a wonderful experience to race people like Celina and Liz, to be pushed and to push others. I think that’s something you can sometimes take for granted, having those people there to make us better and also realizing we can make people better around us.”