Colorado College’s block plan does seem to be advantageous to a student who wants to concentrate in a particular department and get to upper level courses quickly. When courses involve travel or field study, the one course at a time format can be advantageous, since there are no issues with missing other class sessions.
However, it does increase the chance of schedule conflict with courses from other departments which do not coordinate which blocks each course is offered. For example, in the fall, there are effectively only four possible time slots for a class session to be in (the four blocks), compared to many more possible time slots each semester in a traditional college calendar, increasing the chance that two courses of interest are offered at the same time (same block).
Re #20: I’m not sure if your logic is based on the assumption that a course would be offered only once in the span of four blocks. Particularly popular courses, such as those in economics, may be offered every other block, for example.
Yes, a popular course would be offered more than once in each span of four blocks. But less common courses, including upper level courses, may not be offered that frequently.
For example, among the geology courses, 140 (the introductory course for majors) is offered in three of the fall blocks (but only one of the spring blocks). But it looks like most other geology courses are offered once per year.
Whenhen, to answer your question, my son has taken the following courses thus far:
School of Earth sciences Navigation
Intro to Earth Sciences
Earth Systems
Climate and Society
He is currently in his 3rd semester and is considered a forestry major. Both my son, and the Earth Science Dept. are frustrated by his schedule being currently dominated by forestry courses. The Department is finding it hard to live up to their side of the ‘bargain’ that the Forestry department came up with prior to my son’s enrollment in the university. They felt they had not been consulted on the feasibility of the proposed plan. However, part of the problem is that my son has also wanted to be part of the honors program, which makes everything even more difficult to schedule.
OP,
I STRONGLY suggest your son apply to USC, which, as mentioned above, has a superb geology dept, accepts MANY transfer students, offers great FA to transfer students, and even has scholarships available for them.
DS was a Geology major / Physics minor at USC and found the dept offered more geology classes than he could possibly take. He was able to take some of the graduate geology classes as well.
Courses in these topics, should he decide to pursue a geology major, would give him a good foundation in the discipline (and may be required). He should begin by taking one or more as soon as possible, even if his interest is tentative at this point. Some minor adjustments may be possible depending on his interests:
Hydrogeology
Mineralogy
Petrology
Sedimentology
Structural geology
Paleontology
Field techniques
GIS
Also, we (the parents) are going to suggest he take a look at some Canadian universities. He has Canadian citizenship, but not residency, which means he qualifies for the tuition rate of a citizen, but no scholarships or grants. That would be fine since when I checked a year ago for his sister, the COA was around $15K+ (if I remember correctly, that was at U of BC and a couple of other places).