Wow! After I wrote the post below about Christian’s CLEP credits going into the community college, I realized I might be wrong about the number he had earned. I WAS wrong. He earned 15 credits, not 13. When I looked that up, his mathematics placement scores came up. Normally, students need to have completed Precalculus to start the first Calculus sequence. Christian took the test after having completed only half of Precalculus in homeschool. We were very surprised when he tested into Calculus. What I did not know until today is that he did it by the skin of his teeth. He tested fairly highly in virtually everything but Trigonometry. In Trig, Christian needed a score of 50 or greater to get into Calculus. He got a 50. If this would not have happened, both Kelly’s and Christian’s trajectory would have been dramatically different.
Day: September 5, 2013
Day 745 of 1000
I will be in Arizona on Christian’s birthday this year so we had a birthday cake and celebrated a little early with a birthday cake and some candles after dinner last night. It was nice. I thought I would write down a few things about him to celebrate this milestone.
Here are a just a few random notes:
- When Christian was about 12, he had pretty sloppy handwriting, but for some reason or another, he got fascinated with the topic of fonts. He implemented anti-aliasing of fonts on RockBox (an operating system for MP3 players with screens), designed some computer fonts, then decided he wanted to design his own, fast, efficient, handwritten, serif font. He did that and it was quite amazing. For a period of about two years he took notes and wrote letters with a hand-written font that looks essential similar to courier new. When he started getting into complicated college class at age 14 or 15 he needed to write faster, so he dropped some of the serifs, but still has impressive handwriting skills.
- Christian is one class short of his associate degree. He has enough credits, but needs one literature class to finish up. He loves his old community college (Wake Tech) and wants to finish the degree online after he gets out of graduate school. I hope he does that.
- Christian started NCSU as a Junior when he was 16. Rather than go through normal channels to get a canned research project, he approached the professor in charge of electrical engineering graduate research to solicit a research project. The professor told him no one had previously done that, but got the word out and he was given two professors that needed some help. He is now on his third project for the professor he selected and has had a stellar research experience that has included circuit design, data gathering and analysis, PID loop tuning, C/C++, Assembly, and MatLab programming, a research paper, two research posters (and presentations), and he still has a big capstone project and paper in math and image processing to do before he graduates.
- Christian started college full time at age 14, but had 15 credits from CLEP testing he started accumulating when he was 13 that were accepted by the community college.
- Christian started his Senior year at NCSU at age 17. He has a 4.0 GPA. He is taking two graduate level math classes this semester and is scheduled for three more next semester. He has been on the Dean’s list every semester he has been in college.
- Christian took a driver education class that is offered by the State of North Carolina when he was fifteen. He got his drivers permit just in time to spend the whole summer driving from near Fuquay-Varina with his Dad to an engineering internship in RTP.
- Now that he is 18, he is old enough to go into the men’s locker room at the YMCA.
- He is scheduled to do English-Spanish translation at our church convention this weekend.
- He is a good son who gives us great joy.
HAPPY 18th BIRTHDAY CHRISTIAN!!!
