FTCAP Advisement Day-how to prepare?

<p>The homework that they give you; how long does it take? What's involved.</p>

<p>Do you have to know each course that you want to take before you go, or is that what the advising is for?</p>

<p>When do you pick the times/professors that you want? Before you go for advising day?</p>

<p>Is it smart to go on rate your professor before you go to get an idea of the better professors?</p>

<p>Thanks!</p>

<p>It isn’t to critical. Just get a general idea of how to work the schedule of courses website and look for some classes that you may want to take. During your FTCAP day, near the end, they let show you how to schedule. Some dept’s let you loose to schedule on your own. Others will sit you down and go through all possible classes with you. </p>

<p>For your first year at least, most of your classes will probably be prescribed by your major/option, you may get to pick 1 or 2 electives. Use those electives to explore possible minors/double majors. I would take “rate my prof” ratings with a grain of salt. They can vary A LOT. You have the students who did REALLY bad in the class chewing out the prof on there, while you have the top students who give really great reviews.</p>

<p>As far as scheduling: with our first son, we discovered that the advisers pretty much put the kids at a computer and then left them on their own – meaning, they wasted a lot of time wading through a ton of classes that were already filled or trying to figure out what they were supposed to take. </p>

<p>So, for our second son, we picked out his classes in advance (checking the night before FTCAP to make sure there were still slots open). He was the first one done at FTCAP, and saved himself a lot of frustration. </p>

<p>You will be scheduling gen eds, and you can find out exactly how many credits of each you need by checking PSU’s website for your major. </p>

<p>We, too, take the rate my professor comments with a grain of salt. The most helpful info is the factual, objective stuff – say, the teacher gives X number of exams, never assigns homework for weekends/breaks, etc. Personal opinion of the teacher often varies widely and can be greatly influenced by the student’s grade or interest in the topic/class. </p>

<p>Also, at this point many of the classes don’t have a specific instructor listed yet – and even if they do, you can’t take that for gospel. For example, there are some classes where the same instructor is listed for several different sections that take place at the same time in different places. Obviously, this teacher isn’t actually teaching all those classes, but they either don’t know who the other teachers are yet, or they don’t want to identify them. (Sometimes they do this when a specific teacher has a well-known reputation for being tough – or easy – and they don’t want all the students to sign up for one instructor’s sections and avoid the other’s.)</p>

<p>is the math level in the FTCAP testing SAT 1 math standard or SAT 2 math 2c standard</p>