Can I Get Scholarships If I Skip Senior Year for College?

[stakehoagy]

does anybody have experience with going to college right after junior year. I am a sophmore. Rather bored with high school and think most of it is a waste of time- could spend time better by taking harder classes. i take all honors classes possible and currently taking ap calculus and ap world history. you don't have to tell me how much we all dislike ap calculus, i know. next year i signed up to take ap physics, ap calc bc, ap us hist. I was thinking if i took an english 3 correspondence course i could take ap english next year and have the precollege curriculum finished. i really want to major in mathematics and i plan on a double major with second in biomedical engineering. of course the engineering could change after i take some college classes, but that is my intent. input? advice? oh yea, would i be likely to get scholarships if i skipped senior year?

 

[adrian_durham]

does anybody have experience with going to college right after junior year. I am a sophmore. Rather bored with high school and think most of it is a waste of time- could spend time better by taking harder classes. i take all honors classes possible and currently taking ap calculus and ap world history. you don't have to tell me how much we all dislike ap calculus, i know. next year i signed up to take ap physics, ap calc bc, ap us hist. I was thinking if i took an english 3 correspondence course i could take ap english next year and have the precollege curriculum finished. i really want to major in mathematics and i plan on a double major with second in biomedical engineering. of course the engineering could change after i take some college classes, but that is my intent. input? advice? oh yea, would i be likely to get scholarships if i skipped senior year?

I graduated early, myself. I think in your case with all that AP, you might do just fine with scholarships and all. I, personally, just couldn't stand high school, so that's why I got out. In my opinion, it really is largely a waste of time academically speaking, too, and certainly intellectually speaking (and probably socially speaking, for that matter).

 

[jhicks]

I've seen it happen enough to know that there isn't a huge obstacle in your way if you wish to do it. Colleges will treat you as any other applicant and look at your accomplishments when deciding admission/scholarships. One thing I have also seen done is something like actually getting your high school diploma at a university. I have known at least two people that finished their senior year of high school that way and then participated in my high school's graduation.

 

[leon1127]

perhaps you can attend classes in local college during your senior year and taking nothing but APs. it is rather hard to plan graduate early while you are already sophomore unless you satisfy the requirement of your local high school (which differs from place to place).

 

[bob123]

perhaps you can attend classes in local college during your senior year and taking nothing but APs. it is rather hard to plan graduate early while you are already sophomore unless you satisfy the requirement of your local high school (which differs from place to place).

That's a great idea. I don't know how much your high school offers, but where I'm from, it pretty much always ended up being the less intelligent kids that just graduated and left a semester or year earlier. It's certainly not hard to do with correspondence courses and such, so these guys liked rushing things so they could put in more hours at work, and so on.

As for the kids that went to the big universities? We loaded up with up to six, seven, or even eight AP or IB courses a year. (Hey -- it's just high school-level work.) Natural science majors, including math majors, ended up being able to jump into our majors and relevant upper-division courses pretty quickly after, at the most, only one semester of settling into college with, say, the tail end of a calculus sequence. Engineers were stuck with a few introductory courses, but none of them had to deal with irrelevant general college course requirements except by choice.

Looking back, most of us still did the full four years at our universities, but there was no reason we couldn't have made it into graduate school after our third.

Is this an option for you? If you don't like wasting time, getting a lot of stuff done by credit before you have to deal with difficult courses is still a valid option. You'll be able concentrate on your Math/BME double major without having that annoying literature discussion each week, and since it's high school, you don't have to pay an extra year of college tuition, either.

 

[las3rjock]

If you're not enjoying high school, then something like http://www.usc.edu" .

 

[ebaywannabe]

I did what you describe. If you are trying to get into the most selective universities (MIT, Caltech, Harvard, etc.) it is probably better to stick it out through senior year, take courses at the local university, etc. However, if you are looking at a state school, you probably can go right ahead. My case was similar to yours (at a state school), I didn't have the fourth year of English, but they took me anyway (I had eligibility by examination due to high test scores).

As far as scholarships go, you probably would have a better chance as a senior, but I actually got the prestigious one at my state school. I did not actually graduate from high school, just took the GED-equivalent.

 

[algebra2]

you can take AP classes when you're a sophmore? i thought you have to be a jr. or a sr.

 

[ebaywannabe]

These days, plenty of freshmen take AP classes. Some people take them even in middle school.

 

[Riogho]

As a junior I am enrolled at the local college taking physics 111 and 112. I'm also involved in various AP classes, High School is not a waste of time, you just have to make sure not to let your schooling get in the way of your education. (read: take a physics book in your english class)

 

[torquerotates]

High school was really a waste of time. AP classes are for the most part, useless. It doesn't really prepare for college. My friend got an A and a 5 in AP physics C. Guess what he got in his intro mechanics course? a C. If you really want to learn math, get older textbooks because they are usually far more rigorous and usually more interesting. You get to do proofs. On the other hand, AP calc is just a bunch of bs calculations. In fact, ap calc could make you dumber because it trains you to start a problem as if you already knew how to do it.

If you want to graduate early, make sure that you understand math very well. That way you don't have to face excessive stress in college. Sometimes even the best of high-school students fail these intro courses due to lack of preparation.

 

[stakehoagy]

thanks for advice. i want to get calculus by apostol at my local library and work through the problems and especially proofs. except they don't have the volume 2 on the multivariable calc. so i guess i will have to get another text. then get a text on adanced calculus or intro to analysis and see how things go.

 

[torquerotates]

lol. I'm also planning on working through apostol. I definitely think it will help me prepare for real analysis. The problem with apostol is that there isn't really any solutions manual( at least I don't think there's any, I tried looking). So I downloaded a apostol based course, via MITcourseware.com. The course contains useful notes and solutions to their homework sets. I also have Ross'es elementary real analysis( so far his book seems to be easy to digest) on the side for reference and warm up problems. Spivak is great text also. The advantage to using Spivak is gained through the usage of his solution manual. It contains solutions to most problems not given in the back of his book.

 

[stakehoagy]

yea, the mit courseware is really amazing

 

[adrian_durham]

I don't have a copy of the Courant calculus text which I hear is a really good Calculus text, but have you guys seen A Course of Pure Mathematics by G H Hardy? That would really prepare you for real analysis, I think. At any rate, I just thought I would mention it. (I was not entirely happy with Apostol, in the end, myself, for that kind of rigor.)

 

[stakehoagy]

idk i guess I am very lucky because i happen to live next to a huge library and they have just about every math book a person could want.

 

[ebaywannabe]

You can enjoy the 1908 edition of A Course of Pure Mathematics by G H Hardy free on books.google.com, though the book has been kept updated over the years