College at 15?

Francisca
Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:30:40 +0000

I entered college when I was 16 and it didn’t work out for me. I had no purpose or direction and chose my program based on what the high-school counselor, who I only met once, told me would be good. Then again, my college experience happened outside of the U.S., in a place where the course curriculum was fixed and had no electives, and the average student age in my program was 20+. The fact that I couldn’t pick my own subjects was probably the main factor why it didn’t work out: half of them were just totally wrong for me (imagine a 16-y/o doing business meetings and political speeches!).
It was also hard to socialize with other students, as they would drop me from their social group as soon as they found out my age. Again, maybe that’s different in the U.S.

I think that if you want to go for it, you should make sure you know exactly what you want to study (unless you’re going to an LAC), and make sure that the schools you’re applying to have good enough facilities to support someone your age in case of any problems adjusting, especially if you’re planning on living on-campus. It would also be good to find out whether there have been any other young student-enrollments and how they fared in the past, both academically and socially.

I want to stress that I personally don’t regret having tried college at 16; it taught me several life-lessons. I was one of those people who thought I needed to do everything faster and better than everyone else; only after that experience did I realize how wrong that attitude was. Academic smarts are no substitute for maturity and sense of purpose. It took me a few more years to find the latter - I’m still working on the former. ;)