Hello All! While UAH is considered an academically tough school, students who are determined and use the resources available to them have no trouble maintaining a favorable GPA. UAH offers unlimited tutoring and study session opportunities completely free to students. We even have courses where a tutor takes the class with the students and holds outside study sessions for that class. We call it PASS (Peer Assisted Study Sessions)! Aside from the available tutoring and study sessions, our faculty have also been known to provide students with individualized attention.
since you are here do you mind if I pick your brain with some questions?
my son currently tutors at the TASC center at our community college and likes it very much. is it possible to get a job tutoring at UAH Student Success Center as a freshman in Fall 2017?
currently he qualifies for the Charger Excellence merit scholarship (100% tuition + on-campus housing). so does this mean that he is guaranteed on-campus housing for junior and senior year?
if he does a co-op in Huntsville for summer, fall, or spring semester, can he just keep living in his dorm room?
are there many Huntsville co-op opportunities close to campus? would he need a car to do a co-op or are there public transportation options?
i know there are lots of governmental co-op and employment opportunities for engineers (NASA, DoD) but are there lots of private sector opportunities as well?
thanks very much for your help.
Hello, @Wien2NC ! I am happy to answer these questions.
The organization that certifies our Student Success Center stipulates that students who wish to become tutors must have a UAH GPA before they can become a tutor. While your son could not become a tutor his first Freshman Semester, he may definitely pursue it his second Freshman semester!
Yes! He will be guaranteed housing for all years, so long as he maintains the 3.0 UAH GPA requirement.
As long as the co-op is conducted through our Career Services Department, he will be able to maintain all privileges of a full-time student: on-campus housing, fitness center and library access, and will have his scholarship adjusted to compensate for his semester off from taking classes. He will not lose any portion of his scholarship; his scholarship will just be put on hold until he returns to being a full-time student. The way this works is he gets “enrolled” in a co-op section, which housing and career services use to make sure he retains all his student privileges.
The co-op opportunities in Cummings Research Park are very close to campus, though opportunities are not limited to these organizations. The City of Huntsville has public transportation used by students. UAH does not currently have its own transportation system, as our campus size does not necessitate one. While navigating campus is definitely easy by walking, biking, etc., most students find having a car for off-campus activities is convenient and useful.
There are certainly private sector opportunities in Huntsville. Our Career Services Department is active in placing students in all types of positions. They have a database full of employers. You may contact them anytime for specifics!
I hope you found this information useful!
[QUOTE=""]
I hope you found this information useful! <<
[/QUOTE]
I sure did. Thank you very much. We got our acceptance packet yesterday.
@GeorgiaMom50
Yes, my son is still at UAH. It’s been very good to him. Even though he tends to be low-key, he still has forged very good relationships with several of his professors. Like anywhere, some professors he really likes and others not so much. With four semesters, I think he’s only had 1 or 2 that he absolutely did not like because they simply did not teach well. In a different class, the professor was not performing and the department replaced him with someone much better. My son actually likes many of the professors with low ratings on ratemyprofessors, probably because he tends to like the more challenging ones (as long as they back it up with solid teaching).
He has decided not to do co-ops because he wants to get to grad school asap. But with very little effort (attended career fairs), he has received multiple co-op offers. Last summer an awesome internship with a local company fell in his lap and he took it. Then one of his engineering professors asked him to work part-time on campus for her, so he’s been doing that this academic year. He’s also received several offers of off-campus part-time employment during the school year that he had to turn down due to lack of time – he’s already working for the engineering department and has 18 credits.
He and his friends have all kept their scholarships without any trouble. That might be misleading because his friends are more likely to be the more serious students. One roommate from freshman year lost his, but he spent a lot of time partying and very little time studying or going to class.
I’ve been very pleased with how responsive the school is to their students. They try very hard to clear waitlists and get everybody the classes they need to graduate on time. Of course, honors students don’t usually end up on a waitlist, but it’s nice to see that the school values all their students. Any other bumps in the class registration process are always resolved very quickly.
My advice to freshmen? I don’t think it would be any different than the standard advice for any school. My son had a path to be able to graduate in 3 years, provided he took several 18 credit semesters early on. I do have some regret about that choice because he had less time to get involved in clubs. He still did have time though to make friends and have a decent social life. Who knows what the right path is for each individual. I would encourage incoming freshmen to take advantage of the program allowing them to take a class during the summer, if possible. I wish the scheduling would have worked out for my son.
If we could change one thing about the school it would probably be to eliminate some of the general education requirements. I think they roughly compare to most other universities, but son would far prefer to have an extra engineering class than music or theater appreciation. I also have some concern that as the school continues to grow, it might lose some of its warm and personal southern atmosphere. I hope not. It’s one of the things that sold us on UAH.
Thank you, @ThreeKidsMom, this is encouraging. Our daughter is not the partying type but knows she needs to keep her credit hours closer to 12-13. She is taking all dual enrollment classes this year, so that does help get several non-engineering courses taken care of. I hope the school doesn’t lose too much of it’s small feel…it’s what she really likes and why she doesn’t want to go to Georgia Tech. She has done many years of virtual school, so she is used to having to learn on her own. This is paying off, because this semester’s Calculus professor definitely doesn’t teach well. We just hope there won’t be too many of that sort at UAH, because it’s too bad to have to waste class time when it could be better spent learning independently.
@ThreeKidsMom, what is your son’s major? Do you know anything about the CS major, the BFA in Digital Animation or the Game Production minor? Are the courses and professors supposed to be decent? I have a former homeschooled student who thinks he’s going to apply.
Re the general education requirements.
I’m an engineer and have worked with engineers from all over for a couple decades. My chief criticism of some tippy top engineering schools is that some of them shortchange their students in the humanities.
Although we do applied science, all that science interfaces to a world with humans in it. A world with long term consequences better answered by Homer than Euclid, for example. An engineer who isn’t equipped to deal with complicated questions about humanity 's relationship with what we daily do is a singularly hobbled engineer - in my experience.
The humanities requirements at UAH checked an important box in my discussions with DD although as always, other opinions have merit.
My son is in an engineering discipline. I think almost all of his friends are as well. Sorry, I don’t know much about the departments and majors your son is interested in.
…
In regards to what 50N40W says about the humanities requirements… I think my frustration is that son came to UAH with 2 full years of college through dual enrollment. He had ample humanities credits while getting that AS-T degree, but UAH’s requirements are much more regimented than some of the other schools we looked at. For example, he would have had them all fulfilled (maybe 1 left?) had he gone to UA, but still needed 4 classes (5 counting the required Honors English) at UAH.
He visited UA and did NOT like it, so made the choice to go to UAH. Still frustrating that so many of his humanities credits sit there unused while he has to take more to fit UAH’s tight requirements.
Oh, that’s too bad. My son’s taken almost 50 units, and I was hoping he’d get credit for some of them. They’re in general areas such as English, Calc I, Java, Italian, Physics, Econ, and some in more specific areas (animation and game design). I hope he gets transfer credit for some of them, should he attend.
@sbjdorlo
My son DID get a lot of transfer credit that was very useful, but his humanities type credits from dual enrollment did not cover very well UAH’s general education requirements. (English, history, social/behavior science, literature and fine arts)
He came in with many more credits than he needed in social and behavior science, but not any for literature, fine arts or history. If we had known he was going to attend UAH, we could have tailored his dual enrollment classes to cover UAH’s requirements. But until he visited it late in his senior year, it was pretty low on our list.
His calculus, linear algebra, physics, and programming transferred beautifully. He did not have to re-take those. He will have his engineering degree in 3 years.