Help me out here, please. I want to know my options.

holyeuphoria
Wed, 30 Nov 2011 07:45:15 +0000

Alright, a little background about my first.
My family and I moved here from Brazil in 1999, graduated high school in 2007.
In high school, I graduated with a 3.0 GPA, even though it could’ve been much higher but I slacked off because I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, I became lazy and all I ended up caring about were girls and just doing the bare minimum to pass.
Sadly, that carried over into my first couple of semesters at CC.

My first semester at CC was a disaster - I took 4 classes, and I ended up getting 2 Fs, 1 D and 1 A. The following spring I signed up for 4 classes, but ended up dropping them all because I wasn’t taking it seriously, and I was lazy. All I cared about was partying and playing games. Childish, I know. My GPA for that first year ended up being 1.33. I got a college dismissal e-mail, basically telling me I needed to pick it up. I panicked, I had one of those ‘oh, crap’ moments where I realized I was messing with the rest of my life.

Come second year of CC, and I ended up signing up for 4 classes again: I dropped one, got a D in the other, and passed the other 2. My problem was that I became lazy again, and apparently didn’t grasp how serious my situation was turning out. It also doesn’t help that during this time, my father was laid off and my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Despite all of this, my GPA went from a 1.33 to 1.92. Progress, but still had a long way to go.

Spring of that year rolls around, and I signed up for 4 classes again. Ended up getting Cs in all 4 of them, mainly because I slacked towards the end.

Summer after I decided to change my major from Undecided to History, and I took a history course during the summer. I got an A.

Fall of that year (3rd year of CC) I ended up taking 4 classes again, and got a 3.0 GPA. These were all history classes. Come spring, I took 3 classes and got 2 Bs in my history classes, and a C in my psychology class.

Spring of that school year, and I took another 2 classes - got Bs in both. Come summer, I took my ‘last’ history class and got an A.

This fall I ended up taking 3 classes, all of which were the final classes to finish my pre-req’s. I’ll be finishing with 3 As.

My GPA went up from a 1.33 to a 2.6 (by the end of the semester). My childishness at the beginning of all of this is what has messed up my GPA.
What are my chances of getting into a UC with this? CSU?

Also, another thing. I want to change my major from History to Computer Science because there’s much better job openings for CS majors rather than History majors, and they just sound more fun to me. Computers is something I’ve enjoyed since I was little - it’s a wonder I didn’t choose CS to begin with. However, this is my question: if I change majors now, I want to take some classes for it. I’d need to take Trig and College Algebra, which I took in high school and got As, but I don’t particularly remember most of it. I’d also like to take Calculus with Intro to C++ before transfering. Is it worth it to wait another year?

In the end, what should I do? As far as going somewhere, what are my real expectations? Be harsh. It’s taken 4 years to really figure out what I want to do, all the while messing up my GPA. If I could start over, I would. So, thoughts?