It all depends on what your son wants to study. My personal advice to incoming freshman with very high aspirations is to ignore your first year counselors! Their advice is too often NOT tailored to the specific student they are meeting with, as it should be.
I know it sounds crazy… but I entered the University of Michigan as a pre-med student with a specific NS major and minor in mind… a very heavy course load. Just like all of them, my freshman year counselor told me that I should take 14 or 15 credits my first semester and take classes that truly “interest me,” no matter what they were. It all sounded great at the time, but this turned out to be the stupidest advice I’ve ever received, and it will be costing me an entire year of work. I wanted to take 17 credits at first, but my counselor convinced me that this would be way too much to handle. She kept pushing me to replace my difficult intro pre-med classes with unrelated classes that interested me. I ended up taking 14 credits of classes that “interested me”.
At the end of my first semester, I mapped out every single class I needed to graduate. It turned out that only ONE class my counselor suggested I sign up for was going to count towards any of my distributions, major, minor, or pre-med requirements. My counselor essentially expected that I’d change my mind from wanting to be pre-med and take on a different major with a lighter course load.
I have taken 5 consecutive semesters of 18 credits to compensate for this useless semester in order to graduate on time with the academic plans I’ve never changed, and I’m signed up for 17 and 15 credits respectively my senior year. I also have been forced to take a gap year between graduating and medical school because, even with all those 18 credit semesters, I couldn’t catch up to where I needed to be to apply on time. There are soooo many science pre-reqs.
I feel the need to post this every time I see potential incoming pre-meds bring up counselors… map out all your classes right now! Use the “What-Ifs” scenario tool on Wolverineaccess! It sucks, but pre-meds with heavy majors (specifically physics and chemistry) should be taking 18 credits of core pre-reqs right off the bat.