@fanboyhg: Let me try to understand. You are currently in an Early College Program in HS which seems to lean toward Liberal Arts but you want to major in Biology with the goal of Medical School. Is this correct? There are no Chemistry courses available in the Early College Program, but there are Chemistry AP courses available which you are not allowed to take. Are you allowed to take a regular HS Chemistry class, in Early College, just not an AP Chemistry class? If you look at the list below for High School Required Coursework, you need 4 years of Science and at least 2 of the courses have to be Bio, Chem or Physics. Which Science classes are you allowed to take? You need 4 total. If you cannot take a Chemistry class in HS at all, then you may not actually be fulfilling the HS required course work.
Seems to me that the Early College Program does not fit your target major. Those Early College Programs sound good on paper, and maybe they are for Liberal Arts or other Non-Science Majors. Graduating from HS with a lot of Dual Credit or an Associates Degree in courses that don’t fit your target major is a waste of your time and will possibly negatively impact you in college instead of benefiting you.
PLEASE GET YOUR PARENTS INVOLVED. Have a meeting with the counselor with your parents, you, the Chemistry teacher and everyone you can think of. If it turns out that you cannot take a Chemistry class AT ALL, then it sounds like the Early College Program really isn’t fitting your needs and won’t get you close to your goal of Med school.
"High School (This is from the TAMU Freshman admissions site, I am only including it because I am familiar with the TAMU requirements as I have 2 Aggie daughters, check online for all colleges that you are interested in, they probably have similar requirements. Your HS guidance counselor should have access to this info).
Required Coursework
4 years of English
4 years of Mathematics - Three of the courses must be Algebra I, II and Geometry
4 years of Science - Two courses must come from Biology I, Chemistry I or Physics I
2 years of the same foreign language
Students who do not take the minimum required coursework as outlined by Texas A&M must meet the college readiness standards as defined in the State of Texas Uniform Admission Policy."
The main issue with the Early College Programs is that you could graduate from HS with College Credit hours which don’t fit into your College Major plan. At the same time, the high number of dual credit hours prevent you from being accepted to some of the alternate admissions programs, (such as Blinn-TEAM for TAMU), and also make it difficult to start out at a satellite campus before admissions to a main campus (such as PSA or PTA programs for TAMU) if you are not offered a Full Admit as a Freshman. So those Early College Classes are not necessarily valuable for the science degree that you want. They may work well for a Liberal Arts major.
"From TAMU website:
"Dual Credit and Early College High Schools
College coursework completed prior to high school graduation
Students with more than 40 hours cannot be admitted to Blinn TEAM, Engineering Academy at Blinn, or Gateway.
You should choose courses that match your major. Degree plans are available in the Texas A&M University Undergraduate Catalog."
Even having less than 40 Dual Credit hours will limit you on what you can take as a freshman. One of the things that HS counselors don’t always tell you is that ALL DUAL CREDIT HOURS COUNT AS COLLEGE HOURS even if they don’t actually fit in your degree plan. If you started Early College with the hope of only spending 2 years actually at top level Texas University and then going to med school, that probably won’t work. The Early College hours seem to lean toward Liberal Arts requirements which would mean that you would be cramming all of your science hours into your first 2 actual college years and that is EXTREMELY difficult to do.
AP hours do not automatically count for college credit, even if you pass the AP test, you have to actually accept the hours. Most college students are counseled to wait until they are in their degree program to see which AP classes to accept. They discuss it with their college major advisor. Sometimes, accepting AP hours for a pre-requisite forces you into an advanced class that you aren’t really ready for as AP classes are not as rigorous as College classes. So then you take the class (again) as a college student, which might make it slightly easier as you are familiar with the concepts. But the college class could cover your entire AP class material in less than a month and then you will be into new material. If you had accepted the AP credit, you would have missed that extra material and could have been lost in the advanced class in college. Just because you have taken the AP class in HS and passed the AP exam doesn’t mean that you are actually ready for the next level class in college.
Actual 4 year college classes are much, much harder than either Early College or AP classes. College classes are really rigorous, they are taught at a fast pace and even students who do well in HS are not always ready for the rigor and pace of an actual college class. A lot of students who breezed through HS can struggle to begin with when they get to college. Learning how to juggle classes, study efficiently and handle getting yourself fed and on a good sleeping schedule AND also factoring in all of the social mingling possibilities is not easy to do. But it can be done, you just have to figure out what works for you.
This current year, HS Class of 2019, there were a LOT of people on the CC forums who ranked just outside of the Top 10% with SAT scores not quite at the TAMU Academic Admissions level (mid 1300’s and up on SAT. at least 30 on ACT) who were not even offered Blinn-TEAM or one of the Engineering alternate admit offers. They were offered PSA which means they have to go to a satellite TAMU campus for a year. But some of them have a lot of Dual Credit hours which makes it hard for them to find enough hours at the PSA school.
Getting into UT is even harder if you aren’t in the top X% (don’t even know if it is going to be 6-7% or higher for your year).
Have you taken the PSAT or SAT or ACT yet? What are your scores? Unless you have a perfect score, I would encourage you to go online to Khan Academy and spend your time preparing for the SAT/ACT as I think a high score there is more valuable than the Early College Program. Even if you have the Early College degree, if your SAT isn’t around 1400+ or higher, you could be squeezed out of a Full Admissions offer from the top Universities in TX if you don’t fit into their Automatic Admissions percentage.
What year are you in HS? Do you know anyone from your Early College program who has actually gone on to college to major in Biology or another science? What has been their experience? Do you know anyone who has actually gotten into Med School from that HS? What are their experiences? Gather as much info as you can.
Really look at the Early College Program and the AP class program and see which actually fits your target major. What will your class rank be if you are in the 'regular" HS or AP classes? The Early College Program might sound great, but if it doesn’t fit YOUR target major, then is it actually a good plan for you? But PLEASE, get your parents and as many other people involved as possible, get all the info before you make a decision. But don’t procrastinate as time is flying by.
Good luck. Keep us posted.
what should i do? should i drop early college? should i keep begging?