<p>calmom:
I agree, I certainly wouldn't encourage him to think too seriously about leaving this early in the game either. It's just a fine line parents need to walk...</p>
<p>I feel really badly for the freshman that aren't happy at their schools right now. It's hard.</p>
<p>CMU places a lot of emphasis on group and team work. Perhaps the assignment was purposely made to force a team approach. </p>
<p>Our cmu kld also had troubles in frosh 1st term. Physics and Math 1st midterms were so bad that the profs had to give the whole class another test. Kid was happy to get a D when everyone else F'd it. </p>
<p>As for programming, don't know about yours, but ours think that programming class is a waste of time. He just reads the "help" notations of a new program and starts pecking. He may have a guide book to help him, but not always.</p>
<p>CMU is structured in course work. He may have credits for Jr standing, but he may not have the right credits for his major. </p>
<p>For drinking. Yours need to find friends that don't drink, Try one of the many clubs around school. (ours doesn't drink-weak stomach and his roommates are too busy to waste time getting smashed) </p>
<p>Kid reports that the fall recruiting fair is at 150 up from 50 last year and cancelled 2 years ago. </p>
<p>GL</p>
<p>We had discussed the graduate in two years and go to graduate school option, but he wasn't interested. The schools where that was possible just weren't that interesting to him. The only thing that's going to take him 3 years to complete his degree at CMU are the courses in his major. By the end of this semester all he'll have left are his major and his minor.</p>
<p>His hours (credits, really) all contribute directly to his degree. It's the School of Computer Science's policy on class standing that's at work here. No matter how many hours he has, he starts as a freshman and moves up one level each fall, until he's within a year of graduating and he's considered a senior. That means he'll be a freshman, a sophomore and then a senior. It's part of how they make sure that students closer to graduation have priority over classes.</p>
<p>This class hasn't gotten to any team work yet. Those are later in the program. The work he was having trouble came from the professor, or perhaps, one of the people running a practicum.</p>
<p>This probably is a case of him needing to buck it up and stick with it. AKA, we let most of his comments go in one ear and out the other and keep talking to him. We burned my cellphone pretty badly Friday, and I think I got some key things through to him. We talked through the need to start his assignments earlier to allow him to go to professors if there are problems with the code his given. We talked about how there's always problems with using someone else's code in the real world and this was a good thing to learn: always plan extra time, lots of it, for what's going to go wrong. We talked about the real differences between a school like CMU and his other choices, both in terms of how much he would have been responsible for his own learning in the school he had experience with versus what the learning experience is like at CMU. Not to mention the differences in opportuntites coming out of each school. He was in more of a mood to listen once the crisis was past.</p>
<p>Bottom line is that it looks like he'll live. We may have more grey hair before he finishes this first year, but he'll live.</p>