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this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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Edit: after reading your post again, I get the feeling that my advice may not be relevant to you. My comment is specifically dealing with my experience as an American.
This system is pretty incongruous with my college experience. You may get more accurate help if you specify what area you're from
Are you a current high-school student? I can only speak from my own experience about a decade ago but I'd recommend to take as many AP and dual-enrollment courses as you can. AP courses were weighted and boosted my GPA way up and dual-enrollment let me take college courses for free in my highschool. If your school offers either of these, take as many as you can. My local state university actually partnered with our community college so transferring was as smooth as could be. It might be worth actually chatting with both the community college you're considering and your eventual four-year university's admission offices and making sure that what you understand is right.
Don't discount the benefits of Community College, either.
This is absolutely the case with freshman courses at a university. Only difference is that you're paying three times as much for tuition.
Yes and No. I hold both a GED and Highschool Diploma for NJ. I'm also enrolled in the only online virtual high school that seems legit. What you're really asking is, "am I a legal adult?" Yes, I am.
AP classes were never an option at my old high school. It was decided that I had a learning disability and was thrown in the remedial track. The remedial track is a blackhole. If you do well, it proves how much the program works and how well you fit in it. If you do poorly, it proves how much you need the "extra" help. Really, you just get anxiety from the bullies and the hopeless of your future prospects.
One time, as an experiment, I took an online highschool biology class, Bio110 at the local CC, Great Courses: How Life Works, and MITx: Introduction to Biology. The online highschool was actually out pacing the CC classes. Great Courses was really good, but the MITx course actually felt like I was learning tools that I would be expected to use. I was doing pretty well with MITx until it got to protein folding and I didn't have a study group to fall back on. The two breaking points for CC that time was coming into class early(it was a morning class) and hearing the teacher shit talk the class to a fellow teacher and being denied the experiment subject I wanted to run because they didn't have the facilities to grow a biobutanol producing microbe when I was planning on doing it at home.
And getting access to much better attitudes and facilities.
If you're taking a 100 level class, you should not be surprised it is fairly entry level. That's what 100 level classes are.
If you're beyond this material, you can usually test out with CLEP testing. Get yourself into some 200 level classes which are beyond entry level. If you fail the CLEP testing for the 100 level classes, then you should be realistic and understand there is still some material you need from these even if you may know a lot of it already.
When people talk about the benefits of college beyond the curriculum running into these type of situations are where real growth to a mature adult come from. You have no idea what the history is between those fellow teachers are. Its entirely possibly the shit talk was justified. Further, you shouldn't really care. You're there to get an education you need to learn teachers talking shit about each other is noise you need to ignore to accomplish your goal. Getting wrapped around the axel with that drama is a distraction to your goal. Recognizing these interpersonal situations and developing the skills to navigate them are key to mature adulthood.
You're in an entry level 100 class. Its great that you have greater dreams of doing higher level work, but a 100 level class isn't likely going to accommodate that. Many 100 level classes are to simply meet an educational requirement minimum providing and introduction to the subject matter. Expecting 300 or 400 level classwork and lab access isn't realistic. If you want that, show you can do it. Pass the 100 level class and do the higher level class.
I think you should probably be careful with these expectations. Especially as a freshman you likely won't be getting the premium experience you may think your money deserves.
Entry level is entry level. If I hypothetically transferred from CC to MIT, I wouldn't have access to MIT's entry level class. There was far too much time being spent on cell structure.
To summarize what I overheard the teacher saying, she was complaining about how unintelligent the regular session students were compared to the summer session, while also commenting about how unengaged the summer students were. The reason was the summer students are home on vacation from better schools are are just filling out credits. This same teacher also recommended that we decided on experiments based on what would the the easiest and used her example of barn cat behavior that only required her to sit on her back porch watching cats. When she denied me cultivating biobutanol microbes, I gave up on actually learning anything and left the class. She wasn't interested in teaching.
I'm already friends with and have professional relationships with university researchers. I know what to expect. Hell, previously, I only considered MIT type schools as places that actually do things. My "local" state university was mainly known for wasting money on their sports program, but now I realize that they actually do interesting and important things.
To an extent, but I'm not seeing that you're gathering the distinction.
How about taking classes NOT in the field of study you want at MIT. Don't take BIO courses, take something completely not applicable like business courses or humanities.
Right, that just sounds like noise to me. It sounds like you took offense, and instead of just ignoring the noise, you let it cloud your decisions on how to reach your goal. In life you're going to run into all kinds of different people and (spoiler) everyone is flawed in some way. What you posted above could have been a perfectly fine person having a bad day. You going to have to learn to deal with all kinds of people going through life. You don't get to pick and choose the quality of all the individuals you deal with. Further, I've worked with some absolutely toxic people that are brilliant in one specific area. I learned their specialty from them and compartmentalized my relationship with them so their toxicity didn't really affect me much. This is part of being a mature adult.
She might have been an adjunct professor overburdened with too much work and underpaid. Its hard to get excited in those situations. In your pure quest for your own personal self improvement, you might have closed off an avenue of learning because it didn't meet your exact specifications. I'd caution against doing this too much.
But you're not one of their students. You're not going to get the same level of access and attention when you're one of 400 students in a giant lecture hall when the TA (grad student) is who you interact with 99% with during the 100 level classes. The Uni researcher is in the lab or with their 300 or 400 level students doing research not teaching freshman classes.
Right out of high school and beginning college we believe we have the world figured out and we have the answers for everything. Black and White. Unambiguous. Hubris is the best friend of young adults in these situations. I don't exclude myself from this. I did the same thing. I'm seeing many of those ideas in your posts too. I'm not going to try to talk you out of it. Most people I know only learned by going through it themselves and that's okay. Your 20s are for having fun, making mistakes, and learning how to adult.
I wish you the best of luck!
I'm not OP, but I'm confused by this edit. Are you seeing that OP is indicating they aren't an American/in the American academic system? I'm not seeing that anywhere. I agree with what you said and even see pathways OP can take, but if they aren't in the American academic system, then my advice wouldn't be helpful either.
I'm not the person you replied to, but I've never heard of CC as covering exclusively HS content. I'd guess that's where the confusion is coming from?
I think you've given me the missing piece of info. OP is still in High School.
This statement suggested to me OP had already graduated High School but graduated with lower scores:
"When I tried CC..."
The CC classes aren't called HS material, but the biology class I tried absolutely overlapped with the high school material. I could have probably dropped out as a high school freshman, got a GED and started with CC from there. I probably would have been able to negotiate with transferring as a freshman if my CC years were before I was an adult.
This isn't any less true of a "real" college's Bio 101. They don't know what you actually covered (or retained) from HS, so intro classes almost always cover the same material for part of the class. That is in no way unique to (or weird of) Community Colleges.
I'm just not familiar with any system where community college courses can boost a highschool GPA. I may just be misunderstanding the post though
I don't think they're still in HS, but are between HS and college and hasn't been able to get accepted to a traditional college. The CC is a stepping stone
I could be wrong, of course, but that's how I read it 🤷♂️