<p>One option you should look into is taking night courses at your local comm college WHILE IN HIGHSCHOOL. My Junior year, I took 2 one quarter, 3 the next. With some, you can opt to take the class instead of your high school one, (I took 2 history classes at the CC and didn’t take junior year history), or just other classes (I took geology, psych and sign). The reason this helps is:
- Automatically weighted as AP. Get an A? It’s a 5.0
- Relatively easy. CC’s are generally for people who didn’t have the grades to get into a University (obviously, there are other reasons such as money, but in general…) so the classes can be very easy, even in comparison to high school classes. Of course, this will greatly depend on your teacher, so pick your classes using ratemyprofessor.com.
- Some will count for GEs once you get to the UC. My geology class got me out of an area C at UCSB, my history ones got me out of my entire area E and my psych got me out of one area D. That’s 5 (my 2 history classes got me out of 3 b/c semester counts as 1.5) GEs down before my first day at UCSB, and much easier than if I had taken them AT UCSB.
- On your college essays, you can say that you’re so excited about college, you already took some classes, or that you’re a very prepared person and took classes to get yourself ready for the environment. Either way, it looks great and you look like an accelarated, curious student.</p>
<p>If you don’t have time for it during the school year, you can take a few over summer. I greatly recommend it.</p>