<p>To any current students,</p>
<p>How does Course Selection work at ND? how will AP credits affect it? I'll be walking in with 13 credits and was hoping I could take an intro to engineering class to see if engineering is what I want to spend the next three years studying.</p>
<p>Course selection for first semester first year students is different than it is for everyone else. For the other 7 semesters, you will use an online system called DART to select which sections of which courses you would like to take. When you use DART, you get to pick your exact schedule, courses and times.</p>
<p>For first semester of your first year, however, you will receive a course catalog and a course registration form in the mail. You list your first five choices for courses, and a few alternative options if those are full. You can pretty much assume that there will be room in intro to engineering, chemistry, biology, basic math classes, etc. However, if you want to take a smaller class (such as a specific history course that isn’t very large), you may not get into it and you may end up taking one of your alternate courses instead. Also, you only get to list your preference for course titles, not times. This means that you won’t have control over what times you take classes for the first semester; you just have to deal with what you get.</p>
<p>As far as AP credits, you should first verify that you got AP credit for all of the things you thought you would. Many students every year are surprised to learn that their 3’s and 4’s do not earn them credit. If you do earn the credit, you will receive credit for having completed that course, but it won’t count toward your GPA. Basically, AP credit just means you have less courses to take over your four years, so you can take more classes that you want to take that aren’t contributing to your major. AP also allows you to move things around. For example, if you were a biology major, you would need to take chemistry during your first semester. If you had AP credit for chemistry, you’d have two options: you could either take something you need for your major (university requirement, college requirement, or major requirement) early, or you could take another class that you don’t need for your major.</p>
<p>I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any more questions.</p>
<p>@sasbmar I am going to be a bio major. Can I take bio first semester and chem second semester? I feel like that owuld be easier for getting used to college/football is in the fall. Or is there a recommended order for taking classes?</p>
<p>Thank you for taking the time to respond.</p>
<p>@picklechicken37 You need to take chem (I assume you mean gen chem) first semester of freshman year. It is not offered during the second semester, so you’d have to wait to take it until the first semester of your sophomore year. Since you also need to take orgo 1 and orgo 2, this would mean putting off orgo 1 until second semester of sophomore year and putting off orgo 2 until first semester of junior year. This is extremely inadvisable, especially if you are pre-med and plan to take the MCAT.</p>
<p>I personally think that you wouldn’t have too much trouble taking both chem and bio first semester of freshman year. Most of the first year bio students do it every year, and I think they generally find that it isn’t too much of a problem. I think it actually may be beneficial to take them both at once. The good thing about the introductory bio and chem courses is that they are hard because they are college level courses, but the material is comparatively easier than the material in a lot of the courses you will be taking later on (just wait until you take genetics). I am a pre-med chemical engineer, so my curriculum is a little different, but I am glad I was taking multiple introductory math and science courses during the first semester of my freshman year. It was a lot of work, but it was very manageable, and it taught me how to be a college student taking a rigorous courseload. By the time I got to courses that had some pretty difficult material (like some of the ones I took last semester), I was very accustomed to balancing multiple difficult courses in the same semester.</p>
<p>Please let me know if you have any further questions. I’m glad to help.</p>