<p>A lot of students that do very well in high-school find that they have a hard time in college and they aren’t used to asking others for help because they didn’t need to in high-school. College, especially when you’re in an engineering program, goes by very quickly and getting behind early on can mean that it is very hard to recover.</p>
<p>I pushed one of my kids to stay in college and she plain out quit …refused to go back…half way through the semester. All tuition monies nonrefundable. </p>
<p>Not recommended.</p>
<p>Ended up being an underlying undiagnosed health problem.</p>
<p>We are disappointed and concerned that he did not seek help from us or the college when there would have been time to get help.</p>
<p>The fact that he took Dif Eq as a freshman is scary. </p>
<p>**This is a wake-up call for all parents of future freshmen. ** BEFORE your child creates his first semester schedule, talk to him about the importance of having a lighter and balanced first semester. I don’t mean that a student can’t take any challenging classes at first, but not 2 or 3 hard classes or even one class that is really for sophomore year. </p>
<p>The first semester should include a couple of core requirements/gen ed classes and 1 or 2 harder classes. I realize that with AP credits, many kids have completed most of their Gen Ed requirements before college. However, usually there are still a couple that are needed - such as a Fine Arts requirement or Literature req’t or something. If a kid has so many AP credits that all of his Gen Ed are fulfilled, then likely he has room in college years to take a few “just for fun” mind-expanding classes.</p>
<p>I sincerely hope that this young man is able to continue with his education - either at this school or another. I hope that this will just be a “blip” in his life. :)</p>
<p>It sounds like your son may not be sufficiently driven and math-heavy to make a career of engineering, and is more attuned to English and humanities. One suggestion is that he think about combining them in, say, technical writing or science journalism. As a longtime science and medical journalist myself, I can tell you there is a shortage of people who have technical understanding and can write about it clearly for a semi- or non-technical audience. It can be a wonderful career.
good luck</p>
<p>High-school seniors routinely ask for opinions about their freshman course loads in the College Life forum so parents of freshman students can point their kids there to get the opinions of other college students.</p>
<p>I think it is well worth it to talk to the math department when deciding on first year math placement, esp. for a student who intends to go far in the subject, whether out of interest or because it’s required for engineering, etc.</p>
<p>S1 attended a HS which does incredible preparation for advanced math. (Just how good, we didn’t fully appreciate until he got to college. I will confess to feeling like he was about to jump off the cliff into an abyss.) After the math placement test at Chicago, he went to the departmental advisor and talked about what sequence he should consider. He placed into the 160s Honors Calc sequence by the exam, but he had a lot of additional HS coursework (including Discrete, MV, DiffEq and Complex Analysis w/proofs) and a summer math program under his belt that made him feel like he could go straight to Analysis. Chicago has three tracks for analysis, all three-quarter sequences – he was advised to sit in on all three and decide where he felt comfortable. The advisor (who is also a faculty member) knew enough about the different emphases in each and about S’s preparation that she was able to give S some excellent advice. A general advisor would likely not be savvy enough on math courses to do that, which is why I’d suggest making the effort to talk to someone specifically in the math or engineering department.</p>
<p>If your student can bring a course syllabus to the meeting, that would be useful as well, as it would be come apparent to someone knowledgeable if there are any obvious holes in one’s background.</p>
<p>S’s analysis class didn’t have recitation per se in addition to the lectures, but they met every week or two to discuss problem sets and reinforce what they were covering in class. In retrospect, this also seemed to help. He did very, very well in analysis last year. (I say in retrospect because he didn’t meet with a group this fall for Hon. Abstract Alg and Complex Analysis, and I think it would have helped him keep up with the problem sets, and by extension, his grades.)</p>
<p>Math also transitions from the number-crunching to the theoretical around DiffEq, and that level of abstraction is tough for a LOT of kids to grasp. Lots of math majors bug out at that stage.</p>
<p>I can’t help but feeling that people might be missing the point here. Yes, DiffEq could have been a big mistake but we are forgetting the 2 Cs and a D. One of those courses could have easily been a humanity electives. Why did he only take 3 courses during the semester and with such a light load, why did he do so badly? If motivation and effort is the problem, it won’t be addressed by changing major and talking to advisors. Just IMO.</p>
<p>I will second having a more manageable schedule the first term, too. A full load at Chicago (quarter system) is 3-4 classes. Because he was taking analysis and a very tough CS course, he only took three courses until he could gauge the workload and expectations. Worked well for him, though it made him think he could take it easier than he really could.</p>
<p>I took the two Cs and one D to mean the bad grades mixed in with other better grades. It is possible to take a full-time load with three courses if they are four-credit courses in math or lab science. This is typically a minimal full-time load but may be a good choice in some cases.</p>
<p>He’s growing up. It’s common for kids not to want to go for help, indulge in magical thinking (I’ll study really hard for the final, that’ll do it) not to like their advisor, screw up a semester for reasons different from what we parents are told (parties/romance). We went through this and after one semester back home at community college and one probationary summer session, daughter was glad to return to original school. Make sure your son takes an easy load as he rebuilds his confidence.</p>
<p>C is normally 2.0, so if he has other better grades, the average should be above 2.0 which I believe OP said was the cutoff point for staying above probation. I don’t mean to sound judgmental, if I am wrong I apologize. But I believe at the very least, one should investigate and make sure one understand the exact root of the problem before deciding on the remedy.</p>
<p>Speaking from experience (unfortunately) he probably needs a 2.0 for the semester to move off of probation. I suspect the school is going to look at both his cumulative and semester G.P.A. That’s the position my son is in. </p>
<p>Some of the comments about courseload- D did not have a lot of choice with her engineering program. They were required to take 18 credits and some of them were specific sections for her program. For some students with AP credit who repeated core courses, it was an easy A. For other students who perhaps didn’t have the same foundation, they found themselves at the middle or bottom of the curve. </p>
<p>To the OP, I hope things work out for your son. I hope you’ll keep us posted.</p>
<p>Are the 18 required for a four-year degree? I have seen some schools with options where the coursework can be done in 4, 4.5 or 5 years depending on what the student comes in with and the relative coursework that the students want to do.</p>
<p>I think that 18 credits in an engineering program is pretty rough unless one can fill in with easier courses that don’t have much homework.</p>
<p>She’s in a scholars program- they take a heavier load and a few different classes than other engineering students. She also came in with relatively fewer AP credits than the other honors students so had to take a really painful Calc course. I don’t think she’s completely sure that engineering is going to end up being her path - I know what she started out interested in is no longer on the radar.</p>
<p>ahh ttparent…someone else who gets what I am saying. I still don’t understand if there were only three classes taken or if those were just the grades that were of a concern.</p>
<p>markbright2, I would go with your line of thinking if this was the first semester of academic difficulty. This is a student who was already on probation. At that point his feet were on the fire and he still didn’t get proactive.</p>
<p>Blueblzes, does your S have any insight into his study habits or work patterns? It is very common for kids who just “get math” to fall into some traps which aren’t apparent in HS but which can be brutal in college.</p>
<p>Two of my kids are “math kids”. One of them just “gets it”- he can breathe in a concept and breathe out the answer. His HS teachers loved him; his brain was hard wired to understand stuff. One of my kids was very, very good in math. Some concepts came easily, others not. Sometimes the calculations were effortless, sometimes not. But this was a kid who ALWAYS worked hard in math.</p>
<p>Grades were almost identical. Scores were almost identical. Both kids easily the top math kids in their respective years in the same HS with the same teachers.</p>
<p>But mom knows the difference. One kid had barely cracked the book during HS math and physics. One kid plugged away. Both got the same AP scores (minimal prep for the actual test for both kids, but one kid had worked solidly all year and the other not much.)</p>
<p>So I was nervous for the kid who “got math”, and justifiably so- it took two semesters to straighten out his thinking. I was never nervous for the kid who plugged- college would be more of the same.</p>
<p>Kids who understand math conceptually may not realize that at some point they will hit a wall and need to attend review sessions, spend time every single day keeping up with P-sets, going to office hours, setting up mid-semester meetings with the professor or even weekly meetings with a TA-- all of the things that the other type of good math student has been doing already to survive a rigorous HS math curriculum. This seems to be to be a bigger hurdle than the GPA-- regardless of what your son ends up majoring in, any college worth its tuition is going to stretch him and force him to really drill down to master the material and understand it well enough to do well (which he’s clearly capable of intellectually.)</p>
<p>I sweated out life as a Classics major (I know it sounds funny to all the engineers and math folks out there- but it was really hard. Thousands of pages of reading, translations due every week, tests which handed you an essay written two thousand years ago by some philosopher so obscure you’d never heard of him and you were expected to translate it on the spot both accurately and quickly, and then write an analysis of what he was talking about- I’m telling you, it was brutal. If it took you too long to translate you wouldn’t have time for the analysis but how can you analyze before you translate?)</p>
<p>And my brain was wired that way, and I had near-fluency in one ancient languaage when I started college! And it was still a killer.</p>
<p>So it seems to me that getting your son to come to grips with the work habits is more important than just switching majors. You want him to be challenged. He wants himself to be pushed and stretched. But not at the expense of his mental or physical health, and not just by barely passing.</p>
<p>Blossom, great post. Great advice.</p>
<p>OP here to clarify. Yes, he had a 12 credit load (3 courses- 1 math, 2 science required by major) in the probationary semester and got 2 C’s and 1 D. Hence, not meeting the 2.0 semester GPA requirement. </p>
<p>ttparent and ebeeeee…your line of reasoning and questioning is very sound and appropriate. He lacked sufficient motivation and effort to get the job done, even when on probation. (He did kick it up a notch for the finals and finished strong, but by then it was too late). I don’t think being in the “wrong major” is the complete or valid explanation, but I do think it was a contributing factor. (Freshman year he did fine except the F in Diff Eq), and got A and B’s in his humanities classes…)</p>
<p>Regarding taking Diff Eq as freshman, this was probably a mistake (it gets even worse…he was also taking Calc III the same semester). But he convinced us he could do it, and his advisor approved. </p>
<p>Blossom, yes he appeared to glide through HS including accelerated math, APs, etc. with only a modest amount of effort in a supposedly challenging HS. He also excelled at English, languages, humanities in addition to math and science. Work and study habits are a factor in his current situation I’m sure. </p>
<p>thanks for all the great input and sharing experiences.</p>
<p>If your S does think he wants to be an engineer, I would say that he shouldn’t give up yet! My dad took Trig twice and Physics 3 times (might have been more), but he did very well in his actual engineering classes (something like a 3.7 GPA in those) and has been a successful and happy engineer for years. I’ve asked him about the common CC advice that if someone gets a B in HS (let alone college) Calc that they are clearly not “cut out” to be an engineer. He just laughed.</p>