Hi if you guys can tell me how was your CAP experience if you decided to do it. What college did you transfer into? GPA? Did you fit in at your system school? Did you fit in at UT? What made you do CAP? If you didn’t accept CAP, why not? Is CAP worth it to you? That is just an abundance of questions to possibly answer, but I would like to know anything related to the CAP program experience! Thanks and I appreciate those who take the time to respond.
We had a family member who did CAP. We don’t know exact stats but we think he was top 30 percent. He may have been top quarter, but his SAT was not high enough for academic admit at A&M.
His other options were Arkansas, OU, OSU, Tech, Baylor, etc. if he had gotten in to A&M he would have gone there but he got Blynn team and he felt that CAP was better for him because he wanted to major in communications and he loves UT and Austin. This was before PACE or before PACE was offered outside of top 10 percent so he was not offered PACE. He would have chosen PACE over CAP to be in Austin from the start. I don’t know why he did not choose any of the other schools (sorry!)
He got involved in extracurriculars, lived in the dorm, and made friends inside and outside of CAP at the first campus. We thought he might not go to Austin, he was so happy. He worked very hard and made the required GPA but not much higher and went to Austin as planned as an undergraduate studies or liberal arts major. He had a group of friends in Austin that he knew from freshman year. They did not live together which allowed them to expand their circle of friends. At the end of that year, he was accepted into Communications. The next year he lived with a mix of CAP friends and those he met the first year in Austin. He has remarked that he is now in the same spot as people in his class who were top ten percent. CAP can work if you work the plan. It is not ideal but it is possible.
Downsides:
One complaint he has voiced to me about CAP is that it is difficult to use your AP credit or dual enrollment credit. I have seen some threads on CC about that so this may be manageable going in if you research it. I think it took him by surprise and he was not able to plan for it.
He has friends who chose not to go to Austin because they made too many friends (or fell in love) at the original campus.
It is also a little more difficult to graduate on time since there is a chance you may not get in your major after the first year in Austin. If he had not gotten his major, he would have had one more opportunity to apply to communications and then he would have been forced to find another major. He took a few summer classes this year to stay on track. I think trying to get into business, engineering or computer science would have been much harder because transfer GPAs to those schools average very high. I don’t know if he will graduate on time or not, but it sounds like he will.
Hope that helps.