Yeah, do you ever have any time for fun? :o I certainly would not want my son to trade his UG experience for yours. You sound like the type of person he would avoid like the plague. Considering he has another 6-10 years of studying after UG, he wants to bask in the social aspects of it. To each his own I guess. :)</p>
<p>My transcript is prefaced with a list of specific classes for which I was given credit by AP exam score. These include things like one year of English, chem, bio, physics, hist/gov, calc, music theory and 2 years of college French and statistics.</p>
<p>I remember a poster a while ago dissatisfied with life in general because his university wanted him to graduate or lose his scholarship to continue because he had IB and AP credits and started with 65 credits, started at a private school and accumulated some more but the private school only gave him 25 credits or something but when he transferred, the public school gave a credit for everything and wanted him out after his second year of college.</p>
<p>So technically, you are only covering 135 credits in college, which is not a whole lot more than 120 which is what Brown or Yale are claiming they are giving credit for at graduation. In fact most engineering schools require about 135-140 credits for graduation. At Yale, they do give some credit for APs but Yale has a policy that if you use credits, you need to give up one or two semesters of education at Yale (not sure about Brown).</p>
<p>plumazul, you seem to be caught up in worrying about rankings. Perhaps you are trying to validate your choice of UG. I wouldn’t worry about rankings. I would look at freshman retention rates as that tells me how many students believed they made the right choice. Check those out sometime. ;)</p>
<p>P.S. Instead of continuing to hijack this thread, perhaps you should start one on “Why my school is better than yours”.</p>
<p>^ I was aware that some schools have this policy and made sure my school did not. A friend of mine (also a third year although he had about 35 more credits than I did :eek: ) was just accepted at Cambridge so he immediately applied for graduation and will attend Cambridge next fall. I decided to stay the full four years. They allow me to take grad courses for UG credit so I won’t have a problem with choices. </p>
<p>@Kdog044,
Has your S ever been involved in music? (bands, orch, etc. ) Other than being tremendous “fun”, it can foster deep and lasting friendships. I’m having a blast in UG and wouldn’t change a thing. I wish I could post my youtube channel so you might fully appreciate just how much fun it can be.</p>
<p>plumazul, actually if you review the thread I was making a comparison for the OP that one light semester would not hurt them. You, on page 3 felt the need to single this out and comment about how it was part time at your school. How this was relevant or helpful to the discussion is beyond me.</p>
<p>To the OP, I stand by my thoughts on the original topic.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>I think one light semester would not hurt you but I would not plan the entire remaining semesters that way.</p></li>
<li><p>If you had to take summer classes to get back on track to graduate in 4 years I would NOT take pre-med requirements but would look to take the other classes needed for the major or to meet distribution requirements if possible.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I see there isn’t an exact science when it comes to course loads in premed. I will say graduating with 190 credits is a bit ridiculous. Seems like that 70 credits is a good bit of money, time and energy that could’ve been spent on more practical things.</p>
<p>Okay, here’s the rule, which you will have to apply to the facts at issue in your case: medical schools DO care about course rigor, but they are very bad at telling what’s a rigorous courseload and what’s not.</p>
<p>1.) Look at what’s a normal courseload at your school.
2.) You should really try not to underload ever without a good reason.
3.) You should spend at least one or two semesters with a significant overload.
4.) Excessive and obvious efforts to protect your schedule – say, scheduling organic chemistry alongside classes that everybody can tell are fluff classes – will be frowned upon. But doing the same thing with classes that SOUND hard probably won’t be recognized.
5.) Often, your premedical advisor’s committee letter will help clarify this to medical schools, so any gamesmanship that they will notice will be frowned upon.</p>
<p>Thank you so much, that is the post i had been waiting through this 5 page argument. Can you do me one little favor and go back to the first page and look at my schedule I made for myself this next few years. Remember I am a second semester freshman currently.</p>
<p>The problem is that it’s a school-specific analysis, and I have no idea what’s normal or not at your school, or what your committee might tell medical schools about various classes.</p>
<p>Ok so I’ll talk to my advisors about it. I just remembered that my advisor would explain that summer courses are more rigorous than regular courses in the committee letter as well.</p>
<p>Before we digressed, I believe we were asking you why you are spending time taking summer classes instead of adding the other pieces needed for your application like service, research, shadowing etc.</p>
<p>Lmao at the Brazilian thing. I guess that guy lost all credibility on here. </p>
<p>On a more relevant note, I still plan on getting as much volunteering as possible outside of the 10 weeks I will be in shook over the summer and I am planning on doing some whenever I get the chance during the school year.</p>
<p>now that we’ve gotten sufficiently derailed again i’ll thank plumazul for correcting an awful misconception that I had. I’ll be sure going forward to warn people of the perils of going to an ivy league school, duke, stanford, MIT, caltech, hopkins, northwestern, WUSTL, U Chicago or any similar caliber school because they are severely hurting their career prospects and instead should be aiming towards schools like Penn State and Texas A&M.</p>