College Courses Too Easy; Need Advice

College Confidential Community
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Wow, first semester in college is boring… Not challenging, to mundane… My kids would change places in a heartbeat. Definitely maybe look next year to transfer if that makes sense to you but for such a bright kid you have do much to learn about yourself.

First it seems that you have been given some great advice and as usual bloosm is right on. Whenever I see someone like this they are not taking challenging enough classes. But you have both right and left brain so challenge both per se. Learn something about yourself. Do something that makes you feel uncomfortable education wise.

When my kid was bored and not meeting people he started a student organization that went on to get two grants, as a freshman. They hold weekly project based meetings. That led to a full blown tech conference which is leading to a multi million dollar school initiatve. Quotes in tech magazines. His org draws the Graduate students at Michigan. This year they are even given a credit if they join and participate in this organization. He was just asked to TA to the students. He /they already gave a talk to them. My point is… Instead of complaining… Make something happen for yourself. Your smart so figure this out. Maybe put something on your school Facebook and get others to help
For my son he was the “only” one to answer a Facebook inquiry and it just snowballed from there. Professors /alumni have all been too eager to help.

You can also audit a class or maybe just go sit in on a graduate class for the fun of it.

Find someone outside your school to talk with if all the professors don’t have your level of knowledgeable. Maybe start a program with them at your school. Trust me, once you take initiative others will follow. Reach out to Alumni unless they are beneath you. They can help with this initiative and will be willing. Reach out to companies.

Also do something different. You appear very bright. Don’t hold that just for yourself. Help others. Join a study group!! Yes, you can be used to help others. You seem to know how to study and grasp ideas. Not everyone has that skill.
You could do so much good helping others to become as successful as you. Trust me…you might even enjoy it once you get past the idea that they are not on your level.

Also become involved in your campus. Forget about prestudying…join a hiking group. Join a club /group /activity besides research. Learn about Augmented /mixed reality and how it’s being implemented in manufacturing, medicine, business, health, space or whatever.

Also get a job. Not because you want to. You are going to need the social interaction…and not in research either. Work somewhere with human interaction.

Lastly, and I am surprised you haven’t done so (just assuming), reach out to people in your field that you want to learn from. Notable professors, researchers etc. Someone that wrote a book that interests you. If alive, they will write back. Maybe you can get them to lecture on your campus. Maybe you can start something with them on your campus. Challenge yourself.

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Why couldn’t you take proof-based linear algebra? Because of prerequisites?

Two things I can say right away:

  • Reach out to professors in the areas which interest you (and don't be reluctant to go wider) to have independent study with them - for credit if possible. Most will be happy to do this, and you'll cultivate relationships which will be valuable when you need recommendations for graduate school. There's a huge oversupply of PhDs in the U.S., and many very bright people teach in not-so-famous colleges. Find them. If you make great and positive impression on your professors during the next few years, you'll have your pick of grad schools.
  • You'll have no end of problems in your life with this arrogant attitude. Change it. Yes, you may be objectively smarter than other students and even some teachers. This doesn't mean you have nothing to learn from them. From your comments, I'm sure you have a lot to learn, specifically in the humanities. This is the time to question your views and to get a wider perspective on the society. We can't change the society we were born into, and I don't think any society on Earth will seem good enough for you in your present state of mind, so learn to deal with the society you live in.
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OP hinted his attitude and disdain may be what didn’t get him into more competitive colleges. He’s aware it may prevent a transfer.

Many of us didn’t want to ‘work for the man,’ so to say, after college. What stuns me isn’t that. It’s that OP thinks of himself as a special snowflake (old CC term,) feels justified, based on a couple of courses he took and courses he’d now denied. He could use some real world awareness, perspective-- and growth.

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@yucca10: I never claimed I was smarter than any of my peers or the faculty. I’ve simply spent a lot of time on topics I’m interested in and so of course it’s not so easy to move forward now. I also didn’t claim that I had nothing to learn from the faculty: in fact, I did outline a few specific areas where they could help me learn (such as differential equations and physics).

@lookingforward: This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what I said. Firstly, I know that this “attitude” was not an issue with my application since I never brought up a topic that invoked it. The topics in the application did provide some personal insights, but did not involve anything controversial. The reason why I was rejected from so many colleges must’ve been from something else lacking in my application, such as relatively few extracurriculars (although they were pretty good ones for my situation) or simply the fact that I was not a good fit for any of the colleges that I applied to (which could be attributed either to my being a generally bad applicant or an insufficient amount of research before the application process).

Also, my decision to request placement out of certain courses had nothing to do with my joint enrollment credits. I did so because I was familiar with the material for those courses (and was willing to show it) and taking them anyway would do more harm than good in terms of overall benefit. I agree that I could use a lot of “real world awareness, perspective, and growth”, but I don’t appreciate your condescending attitude toward me, in particular your apparent propensity to assume the worst of me.

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Where do you want to go to school? Would you be willing to start from the beginning, the lower level classes? Many elite schools do not give credit for DE/AP classes, although they may give placement at a higher level. Do you have credits for the classes you want to ‘skip’ in the math or science sequence?

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Lol. Too bad you closed with "condescending’ as I was just about to say I do see some normal frustration in some of your posts. Truly. But don’t you see the impact of your words throughout the thread? Your explanation was enough, without the diss. The diss loads your bow.

So what else is going on? What has made you so very angry, not just about the courses, but the “system,” “ideology,” “pandering,” et al? You come across as angry. And unwilling.

Life’s tough. What lemonade can you make?

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I don’t care about the credits as long as I can be placed according to demonstrated ability (within reasonable constraints in terms of time management of course). I have no idea about the choice of school. The earliest I’d consider applying to transfer would be next year, and I might not bother anyway. I took the most challenging courses offered at the local community college during my last two years of high school and received credit for them (with the exception of English). This was mentioned in my initial comment.

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@lookingforward: My experience with the education system and associated authority figures has been uniformly bad until very recently (the sole exception is my research group). It’s hard to not feel angry when you’ve been blamed for problems that fall outside your control your whole life, and are simultaneously held to a higher, unjust standard than others for whatever merits you do happen to have.

You ask what lemonade I can make, but I have nothing to begin with. I don’t know what to look for regarding my own research, I have no such relevant connections, and I cannot clarify my situation to anyone since I will be immediately labeled as too proud or insane. As far as I’m concerned, all work done in the past year is wrong since I have had no way of getting feedback. Moreover, my parents are very pragmatic people. They both opposed my self-studying and didn’t take me seriously until late last school year. They don’t approve of my interests outside of programming and engineering-related work. Any tension with them will render the rest of my relationships with the extended family very fragile. Handling all these factors in a way that doesn’t burn too many bridges is a very complex game with severe consequences if something goes wrong.

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@syntacticalbeing what you are doing now isn’t working. You are not happy. When something isn’t working, you need to make a change. I urge you to seek counseling at your college. There are many tangled threads in your life, and it seems like you have some beliefs that are really limiting you. I think talking with someone in real life could be helpful.

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Op- reality check- “familiarity with the material” is not the same as “mastery of the material”. So chuck that concept out the window. Your self-study, reading a paper, attending a colloquium does not put you on equal footing with the person who CREATED the content you are being exposed to. I find it hard to believe that you have the same level of creativity and analytical chops with an entire university faculty. Some of them may be jerks; some may be lunatics; some may have political leanings you don’t agree with. But the process of becoming a professor has eliminated those who are “familiar” with material (i.e. the dilettantes) and honed in on actual contributions to a field.

You write as though English is your second language- is it? There’s an opportunity in itself. A year of language study (reading the best of the best; crafting an argument; editing appropriately) is going to pay dividends your entire life.

You have some fraught family relationships- I get it. Take Psych 1, or a Sociology class. Having some theoretical underpinnings of what your dynamic is will likely help you navigate these relationships for the next few decades. I suspect you won’t love either of these disciplines, and they are no substitute for therapy (which would also help you) but Psych has some amazing overlap right now with chemistry and brain/cog sci which I think you’ll find interesting. And learning why you react the way to do to certain situations and stimuli is going to help you.

You have difficulty with authority. Yup, I get it. But learning to navigate the world is something successful people do. Are you Steve Jobs? Then ignore me. But on the off-chance that you are a lesser genius than Steve, you need to figure out the whole authority piece or it will stymie you your entire life. The IRS needs a copy of a document from three years ago which you’ve already sent them. The local fire department is insisting you take down a fruit tree which is too close to an electrical wire (or so they say) and the electric company won’t pay for it. The VC group which wants to invest $50 million in your company needs you to get a fancy haircut and buy new clothes before the next road show. Your boss (at some point you will have a boss) doesn’t want you to take off a week at Christmas-- when you’ve already bought airline tickets-- but is offering you two weeks in February instead.

This is life. Inane requirements. If you learn to negotiate and overcome these, your life could be interesting and fantastic. If you don’t, you are going to experience daily frustration and anger and wonder why if you’re so smart, you are stuck working for a moron.

Right???

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Yes!

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@blossom: By “I’m familiar with the material” I mean that I have read textbooks on the subject, worked problems from the textbooks, and applied the concepts to my own interests. Of course that doesn’t put me on the same level as the people who “created” the material (in the same way Galois “created” Galois theory, for example), but I’d argue that’s too high a bar to set for the purposes of my argument. If you define it that way, no one can realistically “master” the material after any length of time, rendering it a useless metric for the purposes of our discussion.

If you read my comments to some other posters, you would’ve realized that I didn’t claim to have greater skill or knowledge than any one of the faculty. In fact the case is quite the opposite. The problem is simply that none of the faculty specialize in any part of any general field that I’m interested in. More specifically, no one does theoretical CS or physics, and the mathematics research is loosely related to my interests at best.

English is my native language, not the second one. I’ve always suspected that my writing was poor, but I have not received any feedback on my writing from teachers, just very high grades. That being said, I don’t put nearly as much effort into online communication as in real life.

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We can’t change the situation for you. You could work on the various skills needed to transfer for junior year.

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Sometimes there are just requirements to get a degree you just don’t agree with but without completing those requirements, you won’t get the degree.

When I was in high school there was a driver’s ed program. I knew some guys who had been driving for years - go carts, motorcycles, farm equipment, snowmobiles, trucks. The law said if they wanted a driver’s license before they turned 18, they had to take this course. Several drove themselves to driver’s ed, parked on the other side of the school, did the required activities for the number of hours required, got the certificate and took it to the DMV. They were more than familiar with the material, but they needed the certificate.

If you want to go to grad school, you need to complete undergrad. You have to take the classes they require. You can do it kicking and screaming about how unfair it all is, or you can work with the school to make the required courses beneficial to you.

Your choice.

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Having seen the material isn’t the same as mastering the material. Do you have peer reviewed papers or anything to show your professors that you applied the concepts correctly?

I thought you were at George Mason University. They have theoretical physicists who appear to have written papers on the subject. And they teach theoretical computer science there too. Have you talked to any of the faculty about your interests?

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@austinmshauri: Yes. I have a peer-reviewed paper and have participated in math research so I’m at least somewhat known in the math department.

Maybe there are theoretical physicists and computer scientists here by your definition. The closest to that that I’ve seen from the physics faculty’s research is some experimental work from CERN (particle physics) from a single faculty member. Many would consider that theoretical physics. For that reason my comment made earlier in the case of physics should be revised to “very few” instead of “no one”. On the other hand, claiming that CS theory is taught here may technically be true but is misleading. Research done here is in very applied subjects that have little to do with CS at all, such as cybersecurity, data science, programming, etc. Undergrad CS courses skimp on the fundamentals due to popular demand, so I wouldn’t see the equivalent of undergrad material at other colleges until the 600 level. The math department is occasionally interested in a theoretical CS problem, but none of the faculty specialize in those types of things.

I have talked to a few faculty but have to be careful in order to avoid coming across the wrong way. I might be able to take some more interesting courses but that will take a year at least, assuming nothing goes wrong at all. The most likely case is that I’ll be stuck with the watered down courses which won’t prepare me for any related career. In that case I’ll focus more on self-study and independent research and hope that my critics overlook the weak formal academic background.

@twoinanddone: That may sound reasonable on paper, but there’s only so much one can do when the situation in question is that disadvantageous. Academic expectations are low here, and it really shows in the students. It may technically be possible to continue self-studying in order to fill in the gaps, but the system will be fighting me the whole way. Even if I did survive undergrad like you say, I will be at a tremendous disadvantage versus those who didn’t have to worry about these things and could make a more productive use of their time due to a better curriculum.

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OP- what career is it that you are trying to prepare for? And what are your affordable options if you were to transfer?

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OP: There is something amiss in your life that was reflected in your college applications. With a 1480 SAT score and strong writing skills (in my opinion), it is odd that you were waitlisted by Virginia Tech–one of your instate schools–and by UVA, and deferred, then rejected by MIT.

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It’s not odd, for colleges that expect more than stats performance. And we can’t tell from the 1480 total, what the M and CR were. And, if OP is from N VA, add the competition from top kids from all the top high schools there, applying to UVA and VT, for stem, with all their accomplishments. Not to mention, MIT, where the bar is highest.

Nor do we know the rest of OP’s app, whether he was too unilateral, too dogged about his interests, had the right academic/EC rounding, or whatever.

OP, it boils down to: what are you going to do about this? You. We know you need a chance to vent. But then what?

I suggested finding local side work, with one of the many tech companies. It may not be a direct bullseye for your academic/intellectual interests, but it puts you smack in the milieu of those who comprehend. Not just the intellectual, but the personality type.

Lots of young adults with higher level interests do this, then endure the first two years of college, where the progress is turtle slow.

Have a plan.

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Math was 770 / CR was 710.

OP is not from NOVA.

Based on the above, it is a bit odd. OP needs to reassess his approach to college apps.

Could be due, in part, that OP hit the first year of VaTech’s mandate to lower admit rate & increase waitlist, but still striking in that OP was deferred at MIT prior to being rejected.

My point is that OP has the goods, but there is something amiss in the delivery.