community college bound

[mamao32001]

My son is going to start attending our community college full-time in the Fall. He will be in his junior year of high school, majoring in Music. Just wondering if anyone has experienced this and wants to share the ups and downs. Thank you,

Cheri

[OnEaglesWings]

Haven't been there, but would like to hear more. Will he be finishing up his high school credits at the community college at the same time he is pursuing the music major? Is he getting an associates degree through the community college?

Kim

[mamao32001]

He'll be receiving dual credit (high school and college) while completing an associates degree in Music. I do have to think through his Math credits though. He took Algebra and Geometry simultaneously Freshman year (at home). This year we started Algebra II, first semester and ended up with a math class (Quantitative Literacy) at the community college, presently. That means 3.5 math credits or so. (I think he should have 4). He is only required to take the current math class for the degree...

 

At least is the plan so far. We did register with an adviser and she seemed up on the whole thing, lol!

 

Thanks for asking.

Cheri

[OnEaglesWings]

What a great opportunity for him. By the time his peers have their high school diplomas, he'll already have an associates degree!

 

Kim

[mamao32001]

We found it a great experience. My dd that will be 15 this fall will start at our local 4 year college after Christmas. My older girls did most of their junior and senior years at that college. It taught them great time management skills and gave them professors to write recommmendations for college. One thing they learned, when asked their year, was to answer sophomore (or whatever) . They didn't point out that it was in highschool... :D The only real problem we had was the college took it upon themselves to call my senior in highschool, already graduated. That could have caused some major problems for highschool sports, so we had to get it changed. Since both girls had been at the college for orchestra since they were 10, the college assumed that they MUST have graduated... :huh: We found our four year college to be a great transition time.

 

Thanks for the post Margaret! I'm hoping it will be a good thing for our son also. I'll keep in mind your advice on which "grade" he will be. I wish I had to worry about the high school sports like you had mentioned. My son would rather play music in his free time.

 

You must have very mature and talented children :0)

Bless you,

 

Cheri

[mamao32001]

Thanks Kim! He has already considered that, lol.

[Christi/NC]

She started dual enrollment with one class when she was 16. She had an incredible professor who become her biggest cheerleaders and eventually her advisor. My dd went to the CC to begin taking classes to fill some pre-req's for nursing school. With that first class she found her "home" in medical assisting and began to pursue that field.

 

She thrived in the CC classes in a way that I could not have predicted. She loved all she was learning and threw herself into it. She did the same with all of the classes she took as a junior. It was such an amazing, perfect setting for her that we made the decision to graduate her one year early and allow her to apply for the medical assisting program as a full time student. She was one of the 20 students selected to join this highly competitve program. She began full time in August and will be nearly finished with her AA after clinicals this summer. This year would have been her senior year.

 

She learned so much in the classes that we did not get to cover at home. She's done more presentations in front of various classes than I could have ever imagined. She's written more papers, participated in more discussions, completed more projects and learned more than I could have put together in these last two years.

 

I hope your experience is as good as ours has been. Our CC is pretty small and while there are other homeschoolers dual enrolled there she has never had a class with any. All of her friends are my age--mom's going back to school once their kids are in school themselves.

 

My son is 16 and will be registering for classes for the fall semester sometime in May.

 

Christi

[mamao32001]

It was such an amazing, perfect setting for her that we made the decision to graduate her one year early and allow her to apply for the medical assisting program as a full time student.

Christi

 

Did she have enough high school credit to graduate or did it deem to be unnecessary with your daughter already immersed in college classes? We were thinking about doing this, graduating our son after his junior year, to take advantage of scholarships and financial aid. Thank you for sharing!

Cheri

[mamao32001]

I'd try to start as you mean to go on - on our case we were available to help out, but tried to set up dd's expectations so she'd be going to her professor with most of her questions.

 

This is a great opportunity to let a kid mess up. Provide the support and encouragement, of course, but let him see what happens when he misjudges how much time and effort something might take... the stakes aren't very high, but the value is enormous. (imho)

 

Our son is currently enrolled in two classes. He has done rather well so we decided to let him try full-time. I have encouraged him to seek out his professors for answers to questions. It took some time but now he is a regular visitor to their offices.

 

Are you saying that the stakes aren't high with enrollment in one class? I tend to see the stakes getting higher with the full-time commitment. Yikes! (Thus my looking for self-assurance by posting here). I guess if we'd started him earlier, he's 16.5, maybe...

 

Thanks for your comments :0)

Cheri

[Christi/NC]

NC doesn't have any requirements for graduation so that helped. With the classes she had at the CC plus the classes she had at home she graduated with 26.5 or 27 credits, I think. The CC never questioned my transcript. This year she has been able to take on a full load of classes and has continued thrive. She's well respected at the CC for how she does in class and with her classwork. She was able to apply (and receive) scholarships and some gov't help with school this year. We are not regretting our decision to graduate her early.

 

Since she did skip her senior year she left high school without taking chemistry. She applied for the RN program and needed chemistry to be considered. She was able to pick up a night adult education chemistry class and has learned a lot. In other words, something that she missed by graduating early were easy to make up at the CC.

 

So now, at 18, she sits approaching summer with her summer clinicals in front of her. She scored 25th out of 110 people who were invited to sit for the nursing entrance exam. They take the first 20 into the RN program but she has a chance to be selected if 5 people ahead of her drop out. If not, she'll be fully employed by August as a CMA. At 18 she has some really incredible options ahead of her! It's really amazing to see your oldest step out of homeschooling and into the world of higher education and adulthood.

 

Christi

[mamao32001]

NC doesn't have any requirements for graduation so that helped. With the classes she had at the CC plus the classes she had at home she graduated with 26.5 or 27 credits, I think. The CC never questioned my transcript. This year she has been able to take on a full load of classes and has continued thrive. She's well respected at the CC for how she does in class and with her classwork. She was able to apply (and receive) scholarships and some gov't help with school this year. We are not regretting our decision to graduate her early.

 

Since she did skip her senior year she left high school without taking chemistry. She applied for the RN program and needed chemistry to be considered. She was able to pick up a night adult education chemistry class and has learned a lot. In other words, something that she missed by graduating early were easy to make up at the CC.

 

So now, at 18, she sits approaching summer with her summer clinicals in front of her. She scored 25th out of 110 people who were invited to sit for the nursing entrance exam. They take the first 20 into the RN program but she has a chance to be selected if 5 people ahead of her drop out. If not, she'll be fully employed by August as a CMA. At 18 she has some really incredible options ahead of her! It's really amazing to see your oldest step out of homeschooling and into the world of higher education and adulthood.

 

Christi

 

I'm sure you are very proud of her! Sounds like a wonderful experience was had by all. I am trying not to stress about the added commitment. My son is 16 but doesn't drive. I'm hoping we all haven't bit off more than we can chew, academically and time-wise. Your post is sure encouraging though.

Cheri

[Nan in Mass]

He did two classes in the fall and two this spring. We wanted to start him slowly and let him get used to learning in a classroom. We were going to just have him take one class, but with the driving time involved, I decided he might as well take two. He took speech and drawing, carefully chosen not to overwhelm him. Speech was great. It was oral, so the homework load was light, attendance was required, and the students all got up and talked about their lives and opinions, which made it interesting. The class taught lots of writing skills without the actual writing part, which was still hard for my son at that time. And he took drawing, which was also great; much more work than the speech. Everyone knew he was homeschooled because my son volunteered lots of info and answers. Some people were a bit curious, and one of the prof's wanted to homeschool his own children and was interested in how mine turned out. So no problems there. He became comfortable on campus, discovered a place to wait between classes, etc. He knew some people there already because we live in a small town and he is known as his older brother's younger brother. All in all, it was very comfortable, once he got all signed up. That part took our combined effort. It took 1 trip to sign him up for classes, 2 trips to do the testing, 3 trips before we managed to have the right combination of things in order to get his books bought, and two before I managed to have all the info needed to get a parking sticker. And he took a tour. We got a student id on one of those trips, and actuated it at the library. It took a bit of work to figure out the computer system. I had to help him figure out how to go through the lunch line - things like how the milk machines worked. And this is the child that took a subway by himself across Tokyo at 13! And I had to do the same thing for my 20yo, who has been working as a plumber in Boston for a few years. My advice is devote the week before school starts to helping your child get all that done. If you haven't been to college before, make sure you keep going back to somebody in administration and asking what else you need. I'm not complaining; it was all very familiar and normal for starting college. The CC worked just like my college (and pretty close to my parents' colleges LOL), so if you've been through it before, you know the procedure. If you haven't, just beware that in residential colleges, there are usually people who walk you through it all the first time round. You need to be that person for your child. They'll need an assignment book and notebooks, too, if the college doesn't supply them (ours supplied an assignment book). You have to look online at the profs' lists of supplies because sometimes they want you to have something other than the books you buy at the bookstore. You can look for the books online used or at a bookstore, too, as long as you are sure what you need. We were told that if you didn't have the book the first day, it was ok (unlike regular college) because lots of students don't have the money for the books right away, or need to make sure first that they aren't going to drop the class. Make sure you know when the add/drop period ends and keep that in mind as an opportunity to back out of a class that you can't manage, or switch to a higher or lower level. Be aware that there are major distractions on campus and you might have to help guide your student towards doing some of his homework there between classes rather than playing billiards or exploring online. There are lots of cool extracurricular activities that you can participate in, too. We went to an international festival and a play. It has been a great experience so far, but I am glad we eased into it. We have watched friends try CC and quit (after graduating from ps). Some couldn't manage to balance a full class load with working. Some couldn't make themselves do the work. Some didn't think it was leading anywhere (the ones signed up for libral arts transfer program). Some couldn't manage to study at home, with all its distractions and expectations. I'm glad we've had an opportunity to ease our sons into college. I haven't checked my son's work (other than listening to speeches and doing the final proofing of papers - suggested by the profs), but I have asked him how much homework he had and made sure that as a family, we set aside time for him to do it. He's working harder than the rest of us in the evenings, now, and it is too easy to plan to do something as a family and not take into account his homework load. We can all watch a video without him, but if it is a special new video, we need to wait for him, or if it is going out to eat, we reschedule around homework. Eventually, obviously, he needs to manage this for himself, but I saw no sense in overly tempting him right at first. By the end of the year, he was saying firmly, "I can't go with you Sun. night because I have to write my paper." He's grown a huge amount this year!

 

Hopefully something in all this mishmash will be helpful.

-Nan

[Christi/NC]

My dd took two classes each semester in addition to the course load she was taking at home. The difficult part came when she had a lot of work and deadlines for her college classes, her homeschool work had to slide some. She found it hard to juggle both when both were very demanding. She thought her first semester at the CC full time was a LOT easier than juggling both homeschool and CC the previous semester. :-)

 

The idea to graduate her early was not in the works when she was beginning to dual enroll. It started to be an idea when we saw how she was thriving at the CC. We initially thought to graduate her at Christmas of her senior year. The program she wanted to apply to only accepted students once per year in April. That changed our plans very quickly and she graduated at the end of her junior year.

 

Nan had a lot of great advice. Pay attention to drop/add dates and things that might help your son if he gets in over his head. Our CC treated my dd like an adult from day one. I could access her files or request info sensitive information (like Pell grant amounts) for my dd if she wasn't standing there with me. I had to walk my dd through handling things like that the first time but after that she did it all on her own.

 

Christi

[Christi/NC]

I'd echo everything you had to say!

 

Christi

[mamao32001]

Hi Christi,

He will be taking 5 classes. Yes, that does seem like a lot but 3 of them are music related - one piano (already taking privately), second guitar (again, private lessons) and music theory (mostly a review). The other two classes will be English Comp. and Rhetoric along with Psychology. He will also be doing some literature and history at home. The later will be sparadic (I know from this semester), depending upon the ebb and flow of his cc coursework. Thank you for advice. I will try and keep an eye on how he is doing with the full load and the drop dates (10 days into the semester or earlier for a complete refund). I also teach on campus. Some of his class times are during my time on campus, enabling me to keep an eye on him, somewhat.

Again thank you,

Cheri

[mamao32001]

Hi Nan,

I read through your post and have had some similar experiences. I do work at the community college. This helps as I know a lot about were to go and who to talk with. We did have to find things out along the way also. My son took his placement test in January and did not do very well. He knew that he could have done better. We did find out, by asking, that he would be able to take it over a second time. His scores in math and writing dramatically improved (or should I say he was able to show what he really knew). Other items like grants and scholarships, when asked about, we were often told two totally different answers! I think we finally have that all straightened out. Most of it will not be applicable until he graduates from our high school. And yes, we do have some extracurricular activities. He was able to find a weekly bible study where he already knows many of the participants. For that, I am thankful! Thank you for sharing your story Nan! I really appreciate your input.

Cheri

[Nan in Mass]

You should be all set then. My son tests badly because he flips numbers, forgets things, and is a very slow worker, so I thought he'd have to take the non-credit classes. He managed to do fine, though. Those placement tests were stressful for me, though, because they were the first testing he'd done since ps 4th grade MCASs.

[mamao32001]

You should be all set then. My son tests badly because he flips numbers, forgets things, and is a very slow worker, so I thought he'd have to take the non-credit classes. He managed to do fine, though. Those placement tests were stressful for me, though, because they were the first testing he'd done since ps 4th grade MCASs.

 

My son has had to deal with tests in his math class this semester. At first, he didn't do very well, but over time he has become more relaxed about it. I very glad that your son had a good experience :0)