Generally the online courses would be the equivalent of the AP Courses, see AP Courses – Students - The College Board - AP Students. These are high school courses that you can get college credit by taking the AP Exam. If your high school offers these classes, you should take them and get A's. Normally Harvard and Stanford students on average take 9 of them beginning in their sophomore year.
Taking college courses are only beneficial if you get A's in them. To do that you need to make sure you have all prerequisite material, see The University of Texas High School at Austin for their entire program directed towards high school students. This is the program that is the cheapest with a transcript, see Stanford University Online High School for cost comparison. If you have all this material under your belt, then you are ready to do college full time, see UT Online Consortium (UTOC)and UTOC · GenEd Courses.
It isn't rocket science to know exactly what courses are need to physics and engineering. School Yourself and The MIT freshman year, all in OCW Scholar has all the necessary courses. If you look at this website, you will see many OCW Scholar courses taken by MIT Sophomores. These courses are free; however, they do not have an associated transfer, which is why I recommend UT High School at Austin and UTOC. I recommend that you understand this material before you take online classes. For example, if complete all the School Yourself material, you can take Math 2412 Precalculus next summer, and take Math 2413 Calculus I and 2414 Calculus II in your junior year.
One of more thing, U of T Austin should be one of your Universities that you should apply to. It is an excellent school, see University of Texas--Austin for ranking.
Bottom line: You are in a state that has a marvelous online High School that can effectively cover areas that your school is weak in. If you have covered the high school material, you can take online college courses.
Additionally, in my opinion, I started a website with students like yourself in mind. There is so much online content out there that it can be overwhelming trying to decide what courses to take, how it might help, what the prices are, etc. I take the content and put into learning paths toward an outcome.
Reverse Tide is my site - http://www.reversetide.com
A few thoughts on your situation.
1) Definitely agree about the AP tests. You seem motivated so you can self-study and get college credit ahead of time. I definitely recommend that as a good tuition saving exercise.
2) If you're uncertain on majors, take a few sample courses so you can test whether it's a good fit for your interests and goals. I have almost all the most common majors on my site and the courses organized for what is commonly needed to get a degree (so it's very organized to help you).
3) Academia is really doing a poor job of adapting their curriculum and teaching style for what employers want. Focus on skills. I counted down the top skills in today's economy and have curriculums aimed to help you achieve those goals. Unfortunately you can't rely on the university to customize their curriculum toward careers anymore. You'll need to identify these things in advance and customize your education to fit that outcome of getting a job (using resources like online education and self-study to fill in the gaps).
Send me a note if you have any more specific questions (my contact info is on my site). Happy to help!
0 comments:
Post a Comment