"Miami, what’s an UG? I am afraid I don’t know that abbreviation.
If there’s no math in Computer Science, why are there so many math requirements for the degree? "
UG=UnderGraduate.
I have no idea about math requirments. I did not have to take any after my engineering career. I did make a mistake and signed up for one class. I told prof that I will be coming only to exams, I really trully did not need any lectures, he had no problem with that. I would ask at college why there are math requirements. There is NO MATH in my job, zero, I have been writing software for over 30 years, working for 9 different places in un-related industries on a different computer platforms, using different languages and software packages. As I said, I wish there were some math, it has always been my favorite, that is why I choose engineering (big mistake!!! Engineering is so much more than math and science, you really need to love technology, I am not into it at all, I am just using PC and mainframe for my job).
“Learning to program is only the beginning of a CS degree even if it is what some people with CS degrees spend all their time doing on the job.”
-And what else is in there? After 30 years of working, I would like to know, better late than never!!!
@BefuddledMom is your son still dealing with health issues now? Does he have chronic issues that will follow him to college and require accommodations from college disability office?
If his medical situation is uncertain, and there is likelihood of repeat flareups, I would be cautious about trying to squeeze in extra summer courses for foreign languages. I would suggest just trying to get regular workload done. Admissions Counselors can learn of extenuating circumstances through student, or guidance counselor. Unless you are shooting for tippy top level colleges, some strong teacher/guidance counselor recommendations can assure college reps of your son’s intellect and work ethic.
If you cast a wide net of possible colleges with solid cs department, you should be able to find one that will accept your son’s high school transcript as is.
My D applied to an OOS public university, well regarded but not in top 20, and they had a requirement for 3 years of the same foreign language. They accepted my D’s 2 years of Latin, 2 years of Spanish without any hesitation.
T.ippy top colleges do accept students with health issues requiring accommodations. This may not be relevant here but just to clarify. There is no need to tell admissions unless a transcript requires explanation. The college absolutely should be told after acceptance.
Summer classes can be a good strategy to making reduced course load- or gaps in the regular school year schedule- work
My son majored in computer science and had to do a lot of advanced math, and physics as well I believe. Much of the math was very relevant to projects for computer science (I remember him showing me a 3D computer project involving a box, ball, and ray of light, which may sound familiar to some on here). I don’t know if IT would be taught more in a technical institute of some kind.
IT as a college major is usually found under an undergraduate business school/major. Sometimes, it may be called MIS or IS or CIS (where the S stands for systems, not science).
OP, a CS major may be difficult. Calc will probably be required. I run a small business(10 employees). My IT guy is my most valued employee. If I have to cut, he will be one of the last. Why? He is the only employee who does something I can’t. All he has is an associates degree and lots of experience. There are lots of ways to get where you want to go. Some require a BS. Others don’t. Have him call or email some IT departments in your area and ask if they would talk to a High School student about their jobs, their education and what is required to get into the field today.
“2 consecutive years” does not mean 2015 one level, 2016 another level, ad if you took a class in 2013 it doesn’t count due to the interruption. It means Level 1+2 (rather than Level 1 in two different languages).
So, the choices are:
1° Take Level 2 of the foreign language where he did poorly (I wouldn’t recommend)
2° Summer community college, take Level 1 of a foreign language offered at his high school (French is easiest unless Italian is offered, Spanish is most common), then take Level 2 in the Fall.
And he’s done, probably could fit both Cs and physics this way.
Op here again, just to clarify a few things.
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This isn’t a kid who’d be applying to “top” or even “nearly top” colleges without health issues. He won’t have the test scores for them, and frankly even if the health issues resolve over the next year, which is what we’re hoping, he still won’t be the kind of kid who can keep up with the pace at a top school. It’s not an issue of motivation either. He’s a hard working kid, who just needs more time than some kids to understand and retain new information.
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We aren’t talking about a Computer Science degree. It could be that he’ll get an IT degree and then go on and do some computer programming. I know plenty of people who work in computer programming with far less related degrees, but I don’t think he’s going to be a good fit for a Computer Science or Computer Engineering degree, because, in part, of the math.
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He’s going to need to attend summer school to make it through in 4 years, because he lost about a year’s credit due to the illness. So, he can’t use summer school to add a credit. Also, due to stamina issues and the fact that he’s got some extra curriculars that are very important to him (e.g. theater), taking an extra class online isn’t an option. He’s got space for 2 electives, they can be Spanish 1 and Spanish 2, or French 1 and French 2, or they can be something else. He’d prefer something else, and I think something else will set him up for success when he gets to college, I just want to make sure that that choice doesn’t close too many doors.
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Returning to the original language wouldn’t be a choice, even if he could somehow catch up, because he’s changed schools and the old language isn’t available at the new school. Even if it was available, and even if we did intensive tutoring to catch him up, I don’t think it would be the right choice. Because the language isn’t written in an alphabet I can read, I have no way to help him. If he was studying Spanish, which I also don’t know, I’d at least be able to look words up in a dictionary, or type his writing into an online translator to see if it made sense, etc . . . Also, there are many more online tools available for Spanish than for the other language.
OP, based on your most recent comments, I recommend you skip the foreign language and let your son take the classes that interest him and are more related to his possible future career. Getting your son to interview/shadow workers in the IT field is a great suggestion. Even finding out that you don’t like a particular field is a great advantage to eventually discovering what you want to pursue.
I am in a similar situation with my son, with both long-term chronic health issues and a more recent injury that may or may not resolve itself in the coming months/years. We are hoping to fit in 2 years of Latin during his high school years, but are looking at college computer science programs that do not require any college level foreign language classes.
Does your son want to finish high school? Would he be interested in a GED? Also, if you do one year at community college you automatically get a high school degree, at least in my state. If health issues caused him to lose a year, there are alternatives to the stress of trying to finish in a certain time frame. It seems as if community college might be a great resource for all kinds of scenarios. (One of my kids did this.)
Sometimes discussions on CC get a little away from the original post (math in CS, tippy top schools etc>) and sometimes they are clearly tangents, sometimes not.
Even though I normally would urge learning the foreign language in your son’s particular case I’m leaning to just letting him take the courses in his area of interest and finding a list of colleges that won’t care about the missing language courses. FWIW, a college language course will probably move at about twice the speed of a high school course.
I am wondering though what the rush is. Might it not be better to just take the extra year to finish high school and use the summers to explore his interests? Maybe take some computer science sooner and make sure this direction makes sense?
My son HS’16 is also one that will be graduating HS without a foreign language, due to some learning disabilities. We looked hard at finding colleges for him to look at that do not require a foreign language either for admittance or for their own graduation requirements.
We are in the midwest and the schools we have found for my S will not fit your criteria of being within 3-4 hours of DC. I would recommend that you look at directional state schools or some LAC’s. The problem with the small LAC’s is that they may not have the major your son wants.
We do have a state directional school here that does not require foreign language for admittance. They do require it to graduate with a bachelor’s degree and allow sign language to fulfill that requirement. So, if my son decides to attend a state school, that will be the one.
There is a small LAC close by that has no foreign language requirements. They do not even have any foreign language majors. They do offer a couple semesters of Spanish that can fulfill a global requirement, but world history or world religions also can fulfill that requirement. And, they have S’s major.
^My only concern would be finding colleges that don’t require a foreign language for admission - does the high school accept students who graduate without the 2 years?
Does he have an IEP?
However, I second mathmom wrt the “rush” to finish high school in these conditions: if he lost an entire year due to illness, it’d make sense if he could actually spend that year in school. He wouldn’t have to rush and he could use the summer to rest (and to take another class than a diploma requirement - for example, a class in a subject he likes.)
A downside to not having a foreign language in high school is that college language classes are a shock to the system- they go very very fast and aren’t for the faint of heart (most students who take Language1 have had one or two years, and 1 semester of college will cover up to 2 years of that foreign language at the high school level. Then 1 more semester will cover roughly one more year or two and, depending on the high school and the college, College level 4 may be equivalent to level4, AP level, or post-AP level.) It’d be like being in a premed bio class where everyone’s taken AP bio and scored a 5, and you’ve never had bio. So if you go the “no language” strategy (which sounds the best), you need to make sure there are state colleges or colleges within a 4 hour radius that would admit him without a foreign language AND do not require a foreign language for college graduation.
It is important to him to graduate with his peers, the kids he’s been with for years. He doesn’t want a GED or to jump to community college, or to take an extra year. He wants to be with his friends.
I imagine that foreign language classes would be challenging at college, but I can’t really imagine that college Spanish is going to be harder for a kid who hasn’t had high school Spanish, than college physics would be for a kid who didn’t have high school physics, or college programming for a kid who didn’t have high school programming. In my experience, plenty of kids pick up a new language in college, so while college Spanish will have some kids who have already studied it, they’ll have other kids who took a different language.
There’s a huge difference between studying a second language when you already have one under your belt than when you don’t. College German still flew by at a breathless pace, but having finally nailed French (by dint of spending a gap year there), all sorts of things fell in place that hadn’t at all with high school French. And luckily German is a language that few people have had in high school.
My younger son who took Arabic in college (he’d done Latin in high school) and found that nearly all his classmates had either had some Arabic or Hebrew and he floundered getting C’s his first two years. He did fine senior year after spending a junior year in Jordan.
I took physics without any physics in high school (pretty challenging ) and comp sci (but in a course designed for non-majors). I got a B’s in both. The real problem with the physics course was that it was full of premeds determined to get A’s!
I understand he wants to graduate with his class, but in the grand scheme of things I’m not sure it’s really the best plan.
I understand that you feel that way. I hope you understand that he’s not your child, and that as his parent I have way more information to make that decision than you do.
okay then - you have to check out all colleges within roughly 4 hours to see
1° which ones admit students without a foreign language
2°among those, which ones don’t require a foreign language for graduation
(perhaps 3°: among those, which ones offer the major/s he may be interested in).
If your son has a terminal illness or another compelling reason to spend time with his friends rather than on high school classes, you’re the best judge indeed. Just make sure he keeps enough options open and find those options for him. You may have to include less-desirable choices, such as a college further away or that requires a foreign language for graduation or community college first before transferring to a 4-year college.
People here are trying to help, often based on personal experience and perspective gained from “being there” but a few years back. It is natural for kids to want to graduate with their friends, and it seems you are confident that your son’s health will allow this.
Sometimes something has to give, however. My own daughter wanted to graduate college with her friends, but due to health issues, missed her class’ graduation, and then another class’ graduation, before finishing. This was hard, but her health and quality of life benefited in so many ways,and she excelled, though with a different timeline than she had hoped for.
I think people here just want to convey that there are options that may seem less than optimal now that may in fact be helpful in the long run if health issues continue, or as recovery continues.
People are truly trying to help, and of course they do no have the information that you have: there are many gaps in information, most likely due to privacy conceerns, and responses are only best guesses.
My only question remains whether your son has a 504 Plan and is being properly accommodated at school. That would be the best way to keep pace and graduate with peers, but perhaps he has not needed one, or perhaps he was too ill to keep up. Again, no way for us to know, so we can only suggest that kind of advocacy in case it has not been done.
One of the requirements for the college my daughter chose was 2 years of the same language. She’s actually very good at languages, but because of THREE different high schools, she was having to take the language online and that wasn’t a good thing for her. So after she’d been accepted to her college but before the final hs semester began, she called an asked if it was absolutely a requirement. Nope. She’d just have to take 2 years of a language in college. And the requirement for admission clearly required 2 years of the same language. Just not that much of a requirement at all. She dropped the online course.
She’s starting French 101 next Monday. Back to the beginning, and she’s fine with that, but she is going to be one of those kids mentioned above who have had 1.5 years of the language, not a newbee is struggling with ‘Je m’appelle John’ on day one.
Your son should take the classes he wants to knowing that there might be a school where he won’t be admitted because he doesn’t have the 2 year language requirement. There will be many schools that will admit him, but there may be a few that will not.
Again- you need to discuss with your son’s HS guidance counselor. That person has many more facts about his situation and should also know of schools that do/do not require a foreign language for admission/graduation. From us you have many possible ways to approach things, given our experiences and limited background. You need to rank priorities, being with friends now seems more important than some other possibilities. Good luck.