I’ve recently been accepted into UCSD, UCSB, and University of Maryland. My interest is in pursuing a career in physics and attending graduate school to get a PhD in the subject. However, I’m very fiscally concerned, and therefore am interested in graduating a year early to take away a quarter of the costs, but I don’t know if this graduating a year early will compromise my application as a PhD candidate. I have all the AP exemptions my school has offered (Physics, Calc Ab, micro and macro, biology, chem, us history, world history, lang and comp, us gov) so graduating in 3 wouldn’t be as tough as I would be able to exempt a fair amount of geneds, however it still would require taking an increased course-load. Any and all info you can give me would be great. THANKS!
Graduating early would mean that you would have one fewer year to do research, yes. This may not be a big deal, since you already know what you want to do and you could potentially get involved in doing research your freshman year, so by the time you apply you may have two years under your belt already, which is customary and good. You’d just have to make sure you jump in ASAP to make up for the time.
Another way this could compromise is that if you are taking an increased course load, it may be harder for you to maintain a high GPA.
And lastly, that means one fewer summer for you to go do a summer REU. First-year students are rarely accepted into REUs, so you would just have the summer between your second and third year. This is probably okay, given that many hopefuls only have one summer REU. But you’d have to make sure that you get one that summer.