I was talking to my long-time roommate who’s in an interesting predicament. Long story short, he’s a tad bit discouraged about going to college because he’s in his third year at a community college, knows what he wants to do in life, but doesn’t think he can get into any particular college because of his grades. Of course, I told him that there’s no set path to college- some do it in four years, some don’t, and that’s particularly all right. But he says he feels “stuck” at the community college, and that he’s ready to transfer anywhere he can get in for his major (currently he’s fulfilled requirements for both Computer Science and Computer Engineering, but he prefers Engineering), no matter what city or college. He’s specifically discouraged because everyone from his high school would be graduating this year (though I told him that not everyone takes that same route). He’s afraid that if he stays at the community college any longer, he’s feeling like he wants to go and just work full time elsewhere and give college a rest.
He’s certainly got the qualifications to transfer; he’s most if not all the Physics/Math/CS courses, probably just shy of four courses in the area (there’s four community colleges where we attend), but his grades have a couple C’s or higher. He failed a couple courses, both in his GE and his major (mostly his GE because he didn’t really care much for that), but made them up-- some with C’s, some with A’s. His GPA’S averaging about 3.2 at the moment.
I’ve explained to him that there’s a lot more to choosing a college than just “what you can get into”-- quality of education, price, location, etc. But it did make me wonder-- are there any college high acceptance rates for Computer Engineering/Science? I know it’s a tough major with a lot of requirements and historically one of the more challenging ones and are impacted. He’s a brilliant programmer and mathematician, snagged a few great internships between semesters, but he’s afraid that it won’t hold as much value toward his case when he applies as his low GPA.
As for high school, he explained that he had pretty excellent grades until his junior and senior year, where he faced some personal problems and his grades weren’t so good. Even so, he was able to be accepted into a CSU, but he left after one year to finish dealing with some of those problems. His SAT is 1820, ACT is 28.
Are there any suggestions as what to do? I promised him I’d take a look around. I don’t quite know what I would do in this situation itself, so I figured I’d search here.
He mentioned that he talked to his counselor yesterday and calculated 3.2 to be his overall GPA between the CSU and CC (exactly how, I don’t know).