I hand carried Kelly and Christian’s high school transcripts into the Wake Tech Community College yesterday. The government schools and I think even the private schools have a way to do all that electronically, but they like to have the transcripts in a sealed envelope or hand carried to the adviser for homeschools. That is really understandable. They have no way to know whether it is valid or not. We also took in all the ACT and CLEP score documents. The adviser was able to enter them into the system and get us going even though none of it will be official until the scores arrive from the official sources in a couple of weeks.
The adviser with whom we worked was very nice. She has one boy currently attending Wake Tech. Her second boy just finished up his Bachelors Degree at UNC Chapel Hill in Physics and was accepted at Boston University for his PhD. It was fun to talk to her about that. Christian initially declared for pre-engineering associate degree, but after we talked to the adviser, looked at schedules, and discussed it all for an hour or so, we decided to rethink his plan a little. There is little room for anything other than engineering classes in the engineering program at both Wake Tech and NCSU. Christian and I both want him to be able to take a few electives in things like graphic design and programming.
I called my old professor and very good friend, Carroll Johnson from my Masters Degree at University of Texas at El Paso. Carroll said that since Christian probably will attend graduate school, his Bachelors degree field did not matter so much as the courses he takes. He said a Physics degree would allow him to go in a lot of different directions. That was good advice, so Christian and I tried to put a schedule together for a Physics degree. After about an hour, we realized that the course offerings at Wake Tech were insufficient for him to graduate in four years. He would have to go directly to North Carolina State University to finish according to that schedule. That is not possible, so we were back to square one.
Originally, when we worked with Campbell University, Christian was going to study Mathematics. It was not a perfect match for what Christian wanted to do, but it was not bad either. We decided to take a look at NCSU’s math offerings. We were amazed to find a program that appears to fit Christian’s undergraduate interests better than either Physics or Electrical Engineering. The Applied Mathematics Bachelors Degree program provides a 15 elective credit block for as a major for application of math and a 12 “anything” elective block. We think it will be a perfect way to prepare Christian for a broad range of future options at the same time it lets him follow some of his passions that are not so technical.