Day 591 of 1000

This is the ninth in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college.  The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.

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Christian’s first class at NCSU was Chemistry.  We really wanted Christian to get started the same way as Kelly.  We described in the previous post in this series how we put her in a single summer class to get her started at Big State U. (NCSU) when she started there.  We helped her choose a hard class called Foundations of Advanced Mathematics because we wanted her to get a feel for the difficulty of STEM classes at national research university and because it was the first class she needed for some future sequences.

The reasons to put Christian in the same class were the same as for Kelly, but we ran into a snag.  When we evaluated his whole program, we realized that he was going to have a pretty tough go at getting all his classes done in time to graduate in four years both because of the sequences he needed and because he did not have nearly as many credits as Kelly.  We described all the reasons for that in this post.  We got a little bit frantic, but figured out a way he could graduate on time.  The problem was that he would have to take a Chemistry class in the summer rather than the Foundations of Advanced Mathematics class.

That was all good and well, but there were two problems.  First, because the Foundations class would have to be put off until fall semester, Christian would have to take a very heavy load during spring semester (he is in that right now) so he will have the prerequisites for the classes he needs to take during his senior year to be able to graduate.  Second, he had to pass a test that showed that he had enough skills from previous Chemistry studies to perform well in this college level Chemistry class.  The problem was he had not had a Chemistry class since fourth grade.  He had only two weeks to study before he had to take the test.  To complicate things a little more, he used that same time period to study the material need to test out of the computer literacy class all incoming students are required to take.  It was a little bit of a grind, but he passed both tests without too much trouble.

We did something by accident that turned out to be important later on.  Christian and Kelly took most of their hard STEM classes together at the Community College.  They helped one another and worked together a lot.  What we did not think about when we split the kids up for this summer semester is that we really did not know how they would do in one of these hard STEM classes if they did not have each other.  It turned out OK, but if we had to do it over, we might have split them up for at least a few classes earlier in the process.

The Chemistry class was a joy to Christian.  He feels that if he had had more time to focus on that earlier, he might have even tried to get a degree in Chemistry.  He had to work hard, but got an A.  That he got an A was a confidence builder for his next semester.