<p>What do colleges think of open periods? I've only got 4 periods as opposed to the typical 5 at our school, excluding sport (due to schedule conflicts), and I don't want to be a TA or waste my time on art or something, so is 4 periods okay? Any suggestions what I do? Oh and no city college courses will work for me either.</p>
<p>Also, does anyone know what Independent study is? Can I just pick a subject and study it on my own during that period and have it show up on transcript or something? Do you need an instructor?</p>
<p>From what I understand, independent studying has no instructor (hence the term independent). If it’s an AP subject, you can self-study it, and when it comes time for that exam, you would take it for the credit. I’d ask your counselor for guidance on this subject though.</p>
<p>^ At our school, independent study is studying a subject during one of your free periods independently with a teacher…self-study is studying a subject on your own, with no teacher to support you.</p>
<p>^ So, is it like just you one-on-one with a teacher assigned to you, or is it one teacher assigned a class full of students independently studying different subjects?</p>
<p>Independent study works differently for different schools. </p>
<p>My independent study went like this:
-I asked a teacher if I could study with her. She said yes.
-I wrote up a syllabus and outline for the course, as well as a grading rubric. My teacher signed off on it.
-I then submitted a copy to my VP and Counselor. They both had to sign off on it.
-My IS worked like this: I worked in the library every day during my free hour. I turned in a 5-10 page paper every two weeks on a different civilization (I was doing art, architecture, and literature of ancient civilizations). Really, I did other homework and then crammed my paper the night or two nights before.
-My final ended up being a presentation to every my teacher’s freshmen classes on ancient literature. Turned into a school-wide 9th grade presentation about ancient literature and evidence against established history.</p>
<p>I am very interested in this as well. I am currently debating whether to take a sixth class or to keep my free and use it for the online math course I am doing? If the online class is on my transcript, would it still look bad if I didn’t do that plus another class, or would a difficult class schedule including the online course suffice?</p>
<p>Yeah, I just want to basically self-study some stuff, but have it show up as “Independent Study” rather than justa free period. Maybe get like some type of credit. Idk though, I’ll talk to my counselor and see if I can do something like romani.</p>
<p>I took Independent Study last year! I asked my Human Anatomy teacher to be my advisor and she said ok (She went to Princeton and majored in Biology). My thesis was “The Science behind Love and Attraction.” It got so interesting (the research) that my advisor gave me 4 of her classes to teach everyone about what I was learning (the effects of different ‘happy’ neurotransmitters on the brain).</p>
<p>So yeah it was fun.</p>
<p>BTW, does anyone know how colleges look at stuff like this? Godd? Bad? AP-level?</p>
<p>I don’t know how colleges look at IPs, but I’m doing an IP where I’m studying a historical period for a quarter, then writing a fiction piece on it</p>
<p>At my school, free periods or study halls aren’t listed on a transcript; only the classes you actually take are listed. So I’ll have 7 classes on my transcript when I have 8 periods in a day. So in the end, colleges don’t even see that you had a free every day, they can just infer it from your transcript. I don’t think they’ll look bad to colleges, as long as you are filling the rest of the day with challenging courses.</p>