I’ve been trawling the interwebs for pros and cons of Bama for a while now. My son committed this week for fall 2023. He’s accepted to the Blount Scholars program as well.
One negative I’ve seen mentioned enough to believe it has some truth to it is the quality of advising. I’m not sure whether there is better advising because of the honors/Blount factor; does anyone know?
My kid wants to incorporate things like study abroad and multiple majors/minors. Also, he wants to make sure he gets the most credit and/or higher placement for his APs.
How should he proceed? It seems like a lot of moving parts that could trip him up, but obviously lots of kids do this so there must be a tried and true path.
Our daughter graduated from Bama with a degree in mechanical engineering. We also have a son who graduated from a top 15 university with the same degree. Advising at both schools was the same unfortunately. I have friends who have kids from IVY and all across the board… same issues. For many of the college advisors this is their first job and/or they did not graduate from the school so not as familiar with the ins and outs. Our daughter ended up taking a foreign language class she did not need and our son had a couple of extra humanities classes. My advice with any school is: your student will need to be on top of what classes he/she need to graduate. Additionally, internships and jobs are also the responsibility of the student. I think a lot of smart kids, honors kids, think that the school will automatically navigate them through everything. The reality is at any big school there are a lot of kids so advocating for yourself is really important. Squeaky wheel and all.
Bama Bound should take care of his credits etc. Advising and support through Blount should be pretty good based on what I have heard. Frankly, you learn a lot more from your peers and seniors versus advisors.
We did a lot of planning before Bama Bound. All the info/requirements are online so we knew what credits he should have for AP/IB, etc. The sheet they had for him agreed with what we thought. The advice for classes seems pretty generic. My son now just gets feedback from friends who are ahead of him when needed.
Degree Works will also show what is needed. Many degrees seem to have flowcharts to spell it out as well.
With respect to building an 8-semester schedule incorporating multiple majors and minors and study abroad, the student needs to approach this as an operations research problem based on the constraints of:
Major requirements for each major or minor
General education requirements
Situations where a course can fulfill more than one of the above categories of requirements (subtracting from the number of courses needed to take).
Prerequisite sequencing of any courses needed above.
AP credit which can fulfill any courses needed above.
Whether study abroad course work can fulfill any courses needed above.
Number of courses or credits that can realistically be taken per semester.
Whether any needed courses are offered less frequently than every semester.
It is likely that most advisors at most colleges are most familiar with students with one major.
Philosophy is his main major; the one he’s been focused on for the last few years. But poli sci, Spanish and international relations also appeal to him.
eta - yes, I just discovered the 16-credit limit yesterday while browsing the (extremely informative!) Facebook group. Each credit hour over is, like, $1,400 for OOS students. So max credits is 128 (16x8).
Maybe some courses would count for two majors … the extra cost definitely has to be weighed. And yes, he could probably CLEP some, but I’m not sure of the point of CLEPping out of courses in something he actually wants to study.
Spanish major credit hours needed depends on placement in the beginning / intermediate Spanish language courses.
Total number of credit hours for all of the above is 138-152. Assuming that each major covers 6 credit hours of the general education (except 3 for political science), and the 6 credit hours of upper level writing general education is covered by the major(s), that leaves 117-131 credits. This assumes no requirements fulfilled by AP credit or whatever (other than possibly higher initial Spanish placement).
This means that doing all three majors is possible with very careful scheduling:
All or almost all courses must be chosen to fulfill one or more requirements. In other words, there is little or no space for free electives.
There is little or no space to take courses beyond the minimum requirements for each major.
EDIT: credit hour counts changed slightly because only one political science course is listed as counting toward the social and behavioral science general education requirement.
Thanks for this.
He’s got some AP credits - not sure exactly how many. Some might cancel each other out/count for the same core requirement. (history and English multiples). But that’ll help. I’m pondering whether to push him to CLEP math or science this summer or something.
Great, thanks so much. I feel like you’re his personal adviser at this point; where’s your tip jar?
So he’s got those cores taken care of.
I’m a bit annoyed at myself for not thinking this through better. Not that the AP courses weren’t worth the GPA bump, but after sophomore year (4s in Eng/history) he could’ve skipped all those exams, it appears.
Of course, we didn’t know the college at that point.
My son has double AP as well. It shows as credit but doesn’t cover a class. It does help for scheduling order at least.
Mine managed to cover his general ed classes with his school credit. He’s pretty much starting at nothing for engineering requirements. It leaves a lot of open spots for classes for a minor or two, which he appreciates. He did CLEP chemistry and would have tried for history or other general ed classes if he needed to. Yours could consider CLEP for an intro level and then be in a slightly more advanced class if the topic interests him. Taking a class over the summer seems to be common. Either to have a lighter schedule or get ahead or just to open up a spot for something else.
Interesting… only one PSC course is listed as being able to fulfill the SB requirement. This changes the credit calculation in post #9 slightly (edited).
If the student has an additional major (whose course work would typically be a superset of the minor in the same subject), would that count as fulfilling the requirement for a minor?
Updating here for future families - kiddo is done with Bama Bound orientation and it’s a very good thing he and I studied.
For the Arts & Sciences college, there were mostly student advisers. While they had good insider info on classes and professors, they were maybe not the best authorities on degree tracks and the little things that can slip you up.
So this post is just advice to use the tools like Schedule Builder and Degree Works in advance to generate some sample schedules. And have course numbers handy - and screen shots of those sample schedules - in case it all goes kablooey. When they start registering en masse, the university will flip a switch and open previously “closed” classes, and it’s a race to register.
I would add to this make sure your computer/IPAD can be used without internet… cellular. Once everyone gets online loading gets really slow. My son was fortunate that he brought his IPAD and did not use the wifi connect.
… the extra cost definitely has to be weighed. And yes, he could probably CLEP some, but I’m not sure of the point of CLEPping out of courses in something he actually wants to study.