Okay so i’m half way through getting my associates degree business administration at my community college. I have one more year to go. and I completed my first year well, I’ve been thinking about it lately and I think I wanna pursue dental hygienist but the problem with that is that all the classes I took will not count towards the prerequisites that I need to transfer to a dental hygienist program I only have taken English all the other classes I’ve not taken nor have I took a science class so I don’t know if I’m even good at sciences I don’t know if I should continue to get my associates degree business administration then do my prerequisites after I get my associates degree then do dental hygienist or if I should stop now and start pursuing dental hygienist instead of wasting my time, but then again I just went through a whole year of college classes for nothing if I do that
Pay attention to your budget, and pay attention to what you want to do. Given that you are currently at community college I am guessing (and hoping) that budget is not currently a problem and that you have not run up against budget issues at least up to this point.
In terms of “wasting” a year, I just would not worry about it at all. Life is not a race.
I have known some very successful people in my life. Of course for most of us “successful” just means ending up in the career that we want. As far as I know, none of us take the shortest path to get to whatever level of success we end up with. Regardless of how successful anyone ends up being, we all first try a bit of this and a bit of that before we figure out what we want to do. This is perfectly normal and entirely healthy.
I might have known two or three people who when they were in high school knew what they wanted to do, and stuck with it. I have known vastly more people who when in high school knew what they wanted to do, and ended up doing something completely different. I however had no idea what I wanted to do when I was in high school, and at the time that I graduated with a bachelor’s degree still had no idea what I wanted to do with my career. I eventually figured it out.
One year of community college is not a waste. It is a start on a path towards figuring out what you want to do.
And my dental hygienist is very good, and helps a lot of people every day.
@Meme9223 is there any chance you can edit your first post on this thread to include some punctuation (periods at the ends of sentences would help). I’m having trouble following what you wrote.
Why dental hygienist?
I read it doesn’t really require a college degree, some people may comment it now does but I remember this specific major as not being worth it.
Have you talked about it at the career center?
Once you get your AA in business studies what will you do, keep going with college and transfer? Stay at your current job with a promotion? Look for a new job?
Are you taking courses allowing you to have a specialized certificate that would make your degree more specific than general business? What’s your career goals?
Not necessarily. The first two years are often spent knocking out gen eds and electives, so at the very least you could have a whole lot of that already crossed off.
None of us knows you – we don’t know your academic strenghts, interests, personality, goals, etc. Only you, possibly with input from those who know you best, can figure out your best career path.
I would not be too concerned about taking liberal arts classes not related to your major – being an educated, well read person is always a positive.
I also think that given that you are not too far along just yet, you may be able to save yourself too great a financial burden before you are truly confident as to what kind of debt you can take on. This is something I am struggling with myself, but I would say that part of it just comes down to betting on and believing in yourself and what you are choosing to do.
There’s a limit of 5.5k in federal loans for the first year, 27k over 4 years (which become 31k when you graduate and start paying it back). That’s what a typical college graduate is able to repay over 10 years.
Taking on more than that isn’t prudent and anyway it often unavailable.
Parent PLUS loans are now capped (and the loans taken during undergrad are taken out of the total authorized so that you need to be very very careful with those at that stage if you intend to go to med school or will need a Master’s degree, and YOUR PARENTS will have to carry the debt, which isn’t very nice to them.)
After you have already started it could be helpful to work at the same time, preferably work study, another job at the school, or something that provides tuition reimbursement/assistance to help curb any extra costs you might get from potentially increasing your time/credits taken.