<p>I am an Asian girl who is planning to attend a 4-year university and major in biomedical engineering. I currently am attending junior college and will graduate from high school early with an A.S. I hoped that by dual crediting in junior college, I would save money and time later. I have, but I am really nervous of what's going to happen to me when I transfer to a 4-yr institution. </p>
<p>Reason why: The level of rigor of my junior college classes has been a joke. I felt like I was just in the classroom to pass the class since the professors were so dang lazy and the homework was just busy work. Only the science and math classes have actually challenged me. I have always been at the top of the class in all of my juco classes, work hard, am used to studying alone, and acknowledge my limits.</p>
<p>My parents have been warning me how challenging it's (professors, classes, and students) going to be for me at the university. They said (I already knew this) that Asians are at the top of the class and that don't want other people's judgment to affect me (since I'm Asian, and all Asians HAVE to be smart). They don't expect perfect grades from me but don't want me to be at the bottom of the class.</p>
<p>Are there other Asians (or for that matter, anyone) who are attending junior college and feel the same way?</p>
<p>You’re not going to face any different of a transition than those who go from traditional high school backgrounds to University face. If you go to a strong university standards will be higher but professors aren’t going to bother making stuff impossible because that doesn’t do anyone any good. If you get into a school on academic merit (as opposed to athletic merit for instance) you shouldn’t worry about being the worst in anything if you care enough to put forth some effort in all of your classes.</p>
<p>I’m probably going to be taking some junior college classes to fulfill some credit requirements for my college and I was told the same thing, that community college classes won’t be as challenging. But since you want to go into math and science and you said that the math/science classes are somewhat good, I don’t think you’re in too bad a position. University science is of course hard (at least from the looks of my friends’ STEM majors), but I really get the strong impression that as long as you work hard, attend class, and are reasonably intelligent getting solid grades (like a B) is quite attainable (of course your Asian parents might pull out the bamboo sword if you get anything lower than an A, but that’s a different story).</p>
<p>Our son went to a state university and our daughter to a community college. The average level of difficulty between the two is pretty big and I’ve talked to some professors at the state university about how well community college transfer students do and many of them do have difficulty. It results in a very wide range of students in the state university classes and some transfers wind up taking five to six years to get their undergraduate degree. In comparing one introductory course that our son took at the state U to a similar introductory course that our daughter took: I’d say that the state U version was six times the work as the CC course. The state U will not take the CC course for transfer credit. You have to take two CC courses to get credit for one state U course and even then I think that the state U students have learned at least twice the material.</p>
<p>Community College quality varies widely from state to state and even from professor to professor. It can help to send an email to the professor to get an idea as to the difficulty level at the CC. I’ve seen CC courses that were comparable or even better than state U courses but this isn’t the norm.</p>
<p>I think that you shouldn’t worry so much about being Asians. Asians are not uniformly strong math and science students. There are Asian immigrants that have the same struggles as most immigrants and that haven’t seen the economic and educational success that the media portray.</p>
<p>Yeah, you’re right, asianamericanson. About the University math and science classes, I mean. Let me guess, your parents beat you with a stick if you bring home bad grades. I don’t think my parents will be beating me with a bamboo stick for not getting A’s…I’ll have to ask. They’ll only be peeved at me if I make anything below a B and really really ticked off if I refuse to enroll in Chinese class at the university.</p>
<p>I’m trying not to worry so much, BC Eagle. I think my parents just don’t want me to be humiliated by my fellow Asian classmates. I guess their nagging is wearing on me. Yes, I can believe that a university course would be six times more intense than the same course at a junior college. It’s been a hit and miss as far as the quality of professors at my college. I’ve gotten a lot of the dud professors, but the professors in the math and science dept. are really good.</p>
<p>If you want to get a feel for classes at universities, take a look at opencourseware videos at Yale, Berkeley, and MIT - they have many course videos online. Some of them come with homework sets with answers and tests with answers. Some also provide online textbooks.</p>
<p>Good to get trivial classes like GECs out of the way at a CC, as well as math and science prereqs for engineering.</p>
<p>I’ve taken joke-easy courses at my 4-year, so not all colleges are rigourous.</p>
<p>I will definitely check that out, BC Eagle. Your advice sounds very good.</p>
<p>lol, your parents want you to take college Chinese? My friend took a year of college Chinese…let me put it this way: he doesn’t speak Chinese.</p>
<p>TomServo, that is somewhat comforting to learn (and, to an extent, very discomforting). It seems that at my cc, the math and science classes are there to also weed out below-average students.</p>
<p>Lol. Well, I AM Chinese, so my parents would be thrilled if I knew how to speak my birth language. Cantonese was my birth language, but I lost it when I came to the U.S. I’m sticking with Mandarin Chinese if I take any Chinese classes. Don’t feel too motivated to learn the characters. You speak any Chinese?</p>
<p>Because math and science courses (for math, science, or engineering majors) tend to have sequenced prerequisites, the CC cannot “water down” the courses much if it wants the four year schools to accept them for transfer subject credit. Indeed, at least here in California, many CCs tend to follow the syllabus of the same course at the nearby four year state university when designing a math or science course.</p>
<p>Our kids attended Chinese language classes for eight years. There are many inexpensive Chinese language schools in the suburbs of Boston that start at 5 or 6 years and run for eight years.</p>
<p>I will say its very dependent where you’re at. I went to DeAnza College in Cupertino CA. They had many students going to UC’s and other prestigious schools from transfers. But then again alot of the instructors were part time instructors that also taught at Stanford. So the rigor was definitely there in quite a few classes. It’s varies so much by school. Look up the transfers at your school where they ended up, will give you a good idea of rigor and difficulty, hell you could try contacting one somehow hopefully in this day and age of FB.</p>
<p>On language, haha our son took three years of Mandarin in HS. I think two of them were honors. Cannot speak a word at all. He’s definitely not taking it in college. I think for language you have to have a passion. If you’re doing it for your parent’s you’ll hate it every minute. I myself cannot read or write chinese. But can speak it conversationally. I’m completely self taught from just watching movies and talking around the house. I was born here and probably couldn’t speak it till about age 10-12. Immersion worked in my case.</p>
<p>It helps to have a native speaker at home. The kids in school that didn’t have a native speaker at home were at a huge disadvantage. There was about 2 hours of homework per day so it was a significant amount of work.</p>
<p>I do want to learn Chinese, santookie. It would be very important for me to learn about my culture and birth language. </p>
<p>BCEagle, you are correct-it definitely helps to have a native speaker at home. But, I do have friends who are fluent in Mandarin Chinese. And since I used to speak Cantonese as a toddler and try to watch Chinese dramas (whenever I have the time), I hope that all is making a tiny difference. I can understand more than I can speak.</p>
<p>Well, I guess if you’re Chinese you really should learn the language–you get a lot of cool points if you can tell people you speak Chinese…not to mention it’ll save you a ton of awkwardness if you go back and visit China. I don’t know Chinese because I had the choice of either suffer and learn Chinese or not suffer and do something else…</p>
<p>The skills are writing, reading, speaking and listening. The kids used to do loads of worksheets on writing Chinese characters. My wife used to talk to the kids in Chinese a lot. I find that many bilingual couples do this when their kids are young and it can result in kids that are comfortable in dual languages.</p>
<p>I’ve tried to learn myself many times without success. The amount of work is daunting.</p>