Gap year app in. We’ll know by 8/1 if not sooner. Fingers crossed (it’s Berkeley so a long shot). Otherwise he’ll start in the fall.
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Mine registers later this month at orientation, but will only have four classes. Regardless of where she’d gone, she’d have taken 4 classes at a time and a huge pro for Wheaton is that 4 classes is their standard to graduate in 8 semesters and she won’t need to take longer to finish. She’s looked at their FYE options and has a few that she likes the description of, but there is no other course selection for her to do until the advising session at orientation.
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My daughter got all the classes she wanted when she registered two weeks ago:
Italian 1101 (4 hours)
Stats (4 hours)
Biology (4 hours)
Brit Lit survey (3 hours)
Freshman Seminar (1 hour)
That’s a total of 16, which I think is doable. I hope she has an okay time in Stats!
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Got today’s proof of life pic from my sister. 
They visited the mother ship of IKEA stores today in Stockholm and ate at a restaurant called Meatballs For The People. They’re getting tired from all of the walking and sightseeing every day and are headed to Belgium tomorrow. My sister has a good friend who lives in Belgium, so they’re staying w/the friend for free on Fri & Sat night before flying home on Sunday. They’re probably going to do touristy stuff around Brussels and visit Bruges.
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It is so interesting to see everyone’s schedules! My D24 can’t register until she is on campus in September, but my S24 is registered for the following
Honors Econ - 3 Credits
Honors Accounting - 3 Credits
Honors Calculus - 5 Credits
Intro Spanish - 3 credits (he did 5 years Latin in High School, and wants a new language)
University 101 (we are told this is an easy A and it is recommended for all students)
So, 17 credit hours, but the best news is that every single one of his classes is capped at 20 students! The only one I’m worried about it the Calculus class.
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My S24 doesn’t register until orientation in Sept. It feels so far away, though I know it isn’t. It’s best to go into registration already having a list of desired courses and desired electives, try to take prerequisites for the major if possible, etc. Hoping I can convince him that it’s better to plan ahead and be prepared to change rather than not thinking about it at all until then.
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We are also back from our two day orientation and registration
Math (3 hours)
Biology for Non-Majors (4)
Liberal Arts (4) This is for her program minor. They do a really critical writing-intensive thing related to literature and philosophy in 12 person seminars. One of the hours is just a mandatory thing where they have a speaker come in and the grade is based on attendance only.
Intro to Philosophy (3)
Choir (1)
1 hour for an honors thing where she moves in a week early and they do community service projects in local schools and have class in the afternoons.
She’s a Psych/Philosophy major and has AP credit for almost all of the general education credits. There is only one section for that speaker thing and choir, and she didn’t get the honors biology or logic classes she wanted because there was only one section that would work. She is just retaking pre-cal and trig. She’s a super humanities kid, and math and science are not her thing so while she wanted Honors bio for the small class size, once she couldn’t get it I encouraged her to think about being in the class with all the pre-Health gunners if she didn’t need to be. Her other classes are exactly up her alley and should be fine. 16 hours, but only 13 are “real” and half of those should be pretty easy, and the Math shouldn’t be all that new, though she took Stats as a senior, so it’s not super recent.
Almost every day she has back to back classes across campus and there was literally nothing to be done about it. Sigh. I warned her in advance that her school was kind of known for mediocre advising and that scheduling the first semester would be rough.
Her experience is so far from my own, at a small university in a small major, where I never once had trouble getting my first choice schedule. It’s not ideal, but it’s fine, and could have been far worse.
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What was his reasoning for withdrawing from the LLC? Potential roommate didn’t want to be in an LLC? Too many course and/or social obligations? Curious what the student perspective is.
So S24’s final grade report came out (we are on a trimester system). After it no longer mattered for college admissions (or really any practical purpose), he finished with his two best trimesters, which meant he finished with his best year. I do think part of that was a variation on the old joke–you don’t need to be able to outrun your senioritis, you just need to be able to outrun your friend’s senioritis–but I am also going to choose to see this as a sign he is very much ready for his next step up in academic challenges.
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He said he did enough research and he felt he was not gaining much by being in the LLC and there were not many advantages of being in other than being guaranteed a moderate AC dorm. I told him a moderate dorm is better than getting a non AC dorm but he said yes there is chance I get a worse dorm but also a chance to get a better dorm.
He had no roommate in mind when he sent an email to the university asking him to remove from LLC so that did not pay any role in it.
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My first semester of college, we literally “pulled cards.”
You were given a stack of punch cards with your information on each. Each section of each class had a limited number of cards for that course/section (say 30, for 30 seats). You would exchange your card for a card in the section you wanted (if still available) and once you got all your classes, take the course/section punch cards and one of your remaining cards ID’ing you to the registration office, where a staff person fed them into an IBM punch card reader to create your schedule (it would also check for conflicts and red flag them for a human to check). Keep your remaining punch cards if needed to add somethign after inital registration.
That system was supposed to be gone by my first semester, but the newer system (no punch cards) had issues and they pulled this back out for one last time.
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My daughter won’t get her schedule until August. The department will register Freshman into courses, then the students can make changes if needed.
It should be Calculus (level dependent on AP score), Chemistry, two major related courses (one is just 1 unit), and probably a speech class for 17 total units. She has most GEs covered already so she can put off the speech class if she wants to take a slower start - except it can be harder to get those classes once they are registering on their own.
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We have less than 10% of seniors in Calculus at our CA public high school. They can choose AB or BC, maybe 1-2 kids get to AB junior year so most just skip AB and take BC Sr year.
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In our high school also you get one year of calculus and its about evenly split between AB and BC but between the two we have 85% or more of senior class who has completed it.
S24 is in a very competitive public high school and usually is in the top 20 STEM school in the country so many kids do STEM based AP’s. I think one of the positives he is going OOS is that he thinks it will be a bit less stressful.
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History with S16/S18 has taught us that better profs in so-so courses are better than bad profs in good courses. In fact, we stay away from bad profs at all costs via RateMyProfessors and now also PlanetTerp at UMd
Thoughts?
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I guess there are times when you have no choice due to the intersection of some requirement and the available course, but I agree, I would otherwise avoid bad profs if at all possible.
I think the trickier bit is like so-so prof/great subject, great prof/so-so subject. Even then if people just want to go with the great profs to the extent possible, there is a lot of practical wisdom to that. But I believe sometimes a so-so prof can actually be better than so-so if given a chance, like visiting office hours and such.
So I think if I were doing college again with much more information available about this issue, again there would be no bad profs to the extent possible, but probably a mix of so-so and great profs where I would make a point of trying to engage with the so-so ones.
Of course I am also a full blown adult (well, sorta) who taught in college for quite a few years, so easy for me to say that.
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With the caveat that I know nothing about PlanetTerp mentioned above, I would caution against going solely by Rate my Professor ratings. You should supplement that with talking to a variety of students who have taken the course, student evaluation reports, syllabi of the course and drilling down into the professor’s background/webpage to truly identify a “bad prof”. Some of the reasons for “bad prof” ratings have nothing to do with how well the prof teaches or knows the material. As a professor at a R2 uni, my colleagues and I can give you countless examples of how expecting anything more than breathing in the classroom from the students will result in a bad prof label. Horror of horrors, if the professor actually calls on a student or expects them to use a student response system! An engaged student will always have something to learn from a professor in the classroom-going to office hours and being invested in your own learning process is key. This is not to say there are no bad professors that should be avoided but I would use more than Rate my professor to identify them.
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I’ve told my son to pay careful attention to the content of the RMP reviews, and ignore ones that just give a number without an explanation. It is really helpful to know things like, “this teacher is very delayed in giving back work” or “the teacher speaks very fast, does not document assignment updates, and is not lenient if you don’t catch an update.“ However, reviews that say, “the class was really hard“ or “the teacher was boring” or “ can’t believe they expected me to come to every class” 
don’t actually give you much useful information.
The RMP reviews have also been helpful to my son in describing what the workload of a class for different professors involves. It doesn’t necessarily mean he will not take the class, but it can help him plan the semester overall.
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Graduation was today! A beautiful event, I feel lucky my daughter got to attend a school where she was seen, nurtured and celebrated for who she is. Independent schools are pretty special. We all had a great day, I did shed a few tears, but mostly I’m just proud of my kid and excited for her next chapter.
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Agreed. Reddit is also helpful because there is usually discussion of why they are good or bad, with the caveat that the Reddit clientele is a limited and biased subset of students (heavy comp sci, stem)
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