Slashdot Mirror
Making the Transition to University?
fracex asks: "I am currently finishing my last year of high school, and have some important decisions to make about next year. Pretty much all my life I have seen myself as going to university as soon as I finished high school, but recently I have been considering taking a year off from school to work and travel. Not only this, I'm not even totally sure what I want to take in university, is what I still want to take. So, taking a year off could give me time to find more direction and focus. What was your experience with your transition between high school and university, and are you glad you made the decisions you did?"
from school to university for the fourth year now. No end in sight.
Personally, I would go to the University. In my experience most of the classes you take the first couple of years are not going to be useful for you (in a specific sense) in the long term. I took Scandinavian literature in translation, for example. I think if you knew exactly what field you wanted to take you would be very frustrated because only 20% of your classes are actually in that field. Get the broad stuff over as fast as possible.
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
If you really want to go to college, then just go. If you decide to "take a year off" odds are you'll never actually end up going.
My recommendation would be to go to school. If it's not to your liking after a semester or two - drop out. It's much better to say that you've tried at something than to never have even attempted.
In addition, it's much harder to go back to school later in life once you start the drudgery of "life maintenance" : I work because I have to pay the bills. I pay the bills because I need a roof over my head. I need a roof over my head so I can sleep after working. It's a viscious cycle.
Taking a year off to travel etc sounds nice now but it's the beginning of a very slippery slope known as sloth. Too much laziness will propel you into a life that's mediocre: it'll be okay but not great.
There's a gorilla from Manilla whose a fella that stinks of vanilla and has salmonella.
I didn't go to college but ended up with a degree anyway. I was advised to attend college by just about everybody, but I started work and took my degree postal with an accredited University.
If you can get accepted to a university do so and then delay entry for a year, most colleges will allow this.
During the year off either travel or work like a dog. Either way you'll be in a better psotion to judge next year if you want to go.
I took a year off to work/travel six years ago, and here I am, working like a dog, and still haven't returned to school. Go, and at least finish a bachelor's degree, or a diploma in something.
The idea of traveling is great and all, but seriously, there's a lot of opportunity in going straight to University, and exploring your options there. There's always the option of studying abroad, which I HIGHLY reccomend if you have the bug to go see Europe or Asia or whatever. Not only will you get to see what you want to see, you'll be that much closer to the ultimate goal, graduation!
Travel aside, University is an experience that I am grateful every day for having done, and would repeat again in an instant. I often have dreams about quitting my job and going back to school, and I like my job! Do yourself a favor and go, don't think twice, try everything that comes your way no matter what, and in the end you may even have a few good memories to reflect on along with an education.
If you don't go right away do something like CityYear or another kind of job with a built in ending. Otherwise you run the risk of staying too long and never going to school. My "just for a year so I can decide what to do" job lasted 7 years. I would have stayed too but there was no room for further advancement without a college degree. Also, expect your social life to take a huge hit if you don't follow your age group to college.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
Don't take a year off unless you're going to be working an incredibly shit job for absolutely no pay. Then you'll be glad to get out of it and into school, and you'll have a realistic idea what grad-school is like.
I got burned out at college very quickly because I knew exactly what I wanted to specialize in, but saw three years of B.S. keeping me from getting there. Instead of focusing on classwork, I focused on my employment and building my skills outside of school. I've now got a 7-year-deep resume in a variety of very marketable fields, but no degree. I think that had I not known what I wanted to do I would have been more receptive to the "fluff" classes (which are valuable in their own right!), and might still be in school today.
My advice: keep with it, and keep an open mind. Don't confine yourself to any major until you've got your A.A. (mid-bachelor's). Dabble in as many things as possible, until you find something that really ignites your passion. Then, and only then, should you begin to flirt with the idea of specialization (as loose a term as that is w.r.t. your Bachelor's degree).
B
You may not realize it, but the time you've spent in highschool has developed habits of self-discipline which are all too easily lost, and hard to regain. I would recommend against taking a year out from school for this reason.
To ease the transition, I would heartily recommend doing what I did, which is to take a year or two of classes at a Junior College (two in the California Bay Area are DeAnza (where I went after highschool) and Homestead). The atmosphere was a pleasant middle-ground between highschool and a "real" college, and they offered many "prep" courses specifically for students making the transition. It is also a good way to get some of your pre-req classes out of the way (the really basic, low-level classes) for a fraction of the cost (tuition at a Jr. College can be a tenth that of a Univerisity). I also lucked out in that some of the courses at DeAnza (higher levels of calculus, et al) were taught as three classes, whereas UCSC crammed them into one or two quarters. I feel that I retained more from these spread-out classes than I did from the crammed courses at UCSC. About 80% of the units I took at DeAnza wound up transferring to UCSC. Also, there were some courses offered at DeAnza (like Asian History) which were not offered by UCSC, so I got exposed to a greater variety of subjects this way.
One of my mistakes was to take too many pre-req's at DeAnza, which left me with nothing but hard courses to take at UCSC. This made my quarters more difficult than they should have been (taking four hard-core CS courses per quarter wore me down).
Some people say that the quality of education at a Jr. College is inferior to that from a University, but I disagree. Both will have some good instructors, and some not-so-good instructors, and the low-level classes are something you can learn pretty well from anywhere -- Calculus, for instance, hasn't really changed much since the 19th century :-) and the books will probably be the same no matter which school you attend. I know that my career has not suffered in any way for having attended two years of Jr. College before going to UCSC.
Good luck figuring out your major!
-- TTK
Take the first year off. Get your own place to live. Nothing will motivate you into your studies better than a crummy job for a horrible boss.
You will learn several life lessons required to succeed in your choosen occupation, and in school life. My year off working in a store as a department manager gave me a extreme advantage to those who came to the business classes with only high school and mom's cooking under there belt. YMMV, this happened in 1980.I have no particular regrets about my University experience. I'm the guy who picked his major right off, and stuck with it through a Masters because I knew what I wanted, going in.
I say "the guy" because so far, I have yet to meet anyone else in real life who took this path. (I'm sure there are many on Slashdot, but that's a much larger pool, so obviously there will be some. My point is the relative size.)
My wife regrets not learning there was a vet tech program in college, instead getting a Zoology degree. And again, note the phrase "not learning"; she never explored enough to find out, and certainly nobody told her.
If you don't know what you want to do, don't declare a major in the first year. Ignore the U requirements for a bit, and just start taking every 101 class you think sounds interesting. Personally, along with my Canonical Computer Nerd path, I also could have majored in music (abysmal earnings potential, I don't think I have "it"), psychology (fascinating), hell, even sociology (useless discipline for supporting me, though). And that's not even a complete list.
It's especially helpful to do this if you're intellectually diverse, because I don't believe in the "one true job" idea. If you find many interesting things, you can pick the one most likely to support you.
That said, while a year off can focus you (or the complete opposite, only you know), and you might find that thing you want to do, it's a relatively limited selection compared to what a University would offer. How are you going to find out if you like Psychology? Or math? (What you've studied up until now isn't math, it's just number twiddling and formula memorization, unless you've done a ton of proofs.) Or chemical engineering? I'm not aware of a way to discover that out of University. (Sure, you might pick up a chance at one of them, but you're not going to get a chance to choose from the entire selection.)
I have no answers, just more questions, but that's a good start, too.
The university environment will provide much better guidance than you could ever provide for yourself. If you take a year off, you'll probably end up just hanging out, and come a year later you'll still have no clue what you want to do. At that point, you'll go to university and figure it out. So why waste the year? Go NOW.
On the other hand, if you're on some kind of soul-seeking quest, that can only be done on your own. But it sounds like you're trying to figure out what you want to study. The best place to figure that out is at the university.
I started university this year, I took a year our between 6th form (rough UK equiv of High School) and I really enjoyed it, I spent the year working for a large multinational company in the eBusiness section, although much of the work wasn't technically very difficult at all, the experience of simply being in the workplace was fairly enlightening.
;) will ask you to return after uni, and you won't even have to job hunt!
However, if you're thinking of taking this route (a year working) make sure you leave plenty of time to travel if you want to, make sure that the work is something related to your chosen area of study (it doesn't need to be that close, just to give you and idea of what kind of jobs you might be looking at, all you really need is a placement in IT somewhere, it will open your eyes enough - assuming you want to do a computing related job). I highly recommend you consider going straight to university however, if your chosen area of study is highly theoretical. I originally was due to study Maths and Computer Science at university, however, I have completely forgotton most of the maths, and consequently lost interest in it, so after the first year is over I will be doing computer science exclusively.
Whatever you do, enjoy yourself, and get some good experience. If you have work experience like that on your CV (an entire years worth in a relevant job) that will kick ass at job interviews, compared to all the straight line academics. You may even find the company you work for during your "studying break"
I wish you the best of luck at university/in a job/whatever you choose.
.sigs are for losers
The only other things I'd add are:
Yeah, right.
Plus you can buy alcohol.
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
My recommendation is to not to do it between high school and university.
Premise is that you are American, and are "average" when it comes to social adaptation.
University is a great place to continue your maturity, learn to live away from home and parents, make good decisions and bad, and learn something academically as well. When you finish school, find a job and work for a while.
After a few years of working (paying off student loans, saving up a little cash, deciding what you like and don't), then you are allowed to take off as much as a couple years. Don't set a timeline. Go to some place that interests you (and where you can live cheap and work a little), move around a bit, and challenge yourself. When you run out of money, figure out what to do next...
This is what I did. I know that going back to school after spending a couple years on a tropical island wouldn't work for me. (Honestly, learning to write again was hard...) Also, I personally needed the extra time to "grow" as a person that college allowed me. I have noticed that the vast majority of Americans have this same need. Most Europeans tend to be considerably more mature at 18 than their US counterparts.
I spent most of two years scuba diving on an island in Thailand, with trips off to Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, and Ireland. When I was done, I was ready to go back to engineering. After a few more years of engineering, I'm ready to head back again for a while. It was fun, and I am happy I did it. I am also happy that I waited until I was over 25 to do it, where I had some financial backup and a better sense of how things really work. It was also easier for me to find "good" work being a little older.
Being a mere sophomore, I remember my transition quite well. In my opinion -- it's not a big deal. More than anything make sure you're happy. If you're not, you can always transfer but keep that to a last resort. Going into college you don't have to know what you want to do but a general idea helps -- take as many diverse classes as possible. Learn as much as possible. I will say this, coming in with AP Credit can help a bunch in the self-discovery process so you can bypass the basics and get to the good stuff to find out what you really want to do. Study hard. Party hard. Sleep and BE SURE to try to do things that interest you in your free-time instead of just hitting up the video-games (though that's never a bad thing)
Now then, Dmitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb...
I've seen *many* smart and logical people get sucked into the work vortex never to fully return to school- usually with regrets. Myself included.
Many of them also took time off later in college with only a year or less to go. Same reasons- burnout, 'gain more focus', explore, etc.
Most people don't know what they really want to do and change their majors several times. It's really common and once you're in you'll connect with people studying some very interesting things that you probably haven't been exposed to yet.
Keep in mind the university isn't the real world. When you lean toward a field of study that leads directly to a career -investigate that career before going too far into the major! Don't trust the university to show you the real world version.
For instance, architecture/arch engineering. In the university it draws many to the program and encourages / demands artistic expression. you get to sculpt and engineer! great! Walk out with a diploma with the zeal to build futuristic cities. Join the best architectue firm you can. be a CAD slave for 20-45 years drafting someone elses crappy designs from their napkins and then maybe when you're grey you can take over and do your own design, but then realize 90% of the 'design' is mosly just a million warehouses with a cheap facade stapled on to it.
This happened to 3 of my friends who didn't check out the actual career first. The 4th one did an internship and talked with every architect he could early on. He kept studying architecture because he liked it, but changed majors. He also wasn't too thrilled with the 'culture' of architects. The other 3 are kinda bitter about the whole thing.
Go to school, travel next summer. It's really not that long from now. Get a part time job if you need to, in fact definatley get a part time job if you can swing it. It can help keep you grounded from some of the academia glaze.
best of luck!
Firefox &
If you don't know what you want to do in your year out, go to uni. If you want a year out sometime during uni then fine - most places are cool with that. But if you take a year out and spend the whole time sponging off your folks and watching the TV, you will find it *much* harder getting a job later.
One big thing *not* to do in your year out is to do a year out with a sponsor company. In the UK, there are sponsorships going with engineering companies (to attract students to work at those companies afterwards). The deal is usually that you work two years with them, of which one will usually be before or during uni. I got sponsorship and decided to do a year out beforehand.
Big mistake. HUGE! Why? Well, your typical engineering company needs graduate-level people as a minimum standard. If you've just come out of high school, you can't help them. Result: you spend a year working on the production line. Now some time on the shop floor is a good thing, but most intelligent people do *not* want to do this. Eventually you settle into a rut, because the job needs no intelligence so you "switch off". And boy, is it hard to switch back on again when you start uni! To be honest, I didn't really start getting back into it properly until the fourth year of my course.
If you've got a real definite goal in mind, then great. "Me and my band are going to try and make a living off it." "I want to go to Africa and work with Oxfam." Or even "I want to travel round the world, just because it seems a cool thing to do." Excellent. This is the time to go and do it, while you've got no other committments. Get out there and go for it! But if you're not driven that way, you're wasting your time. A year flipping burgers is *not* a good use of your time and brains.
Another thing to consider is that you will have forgotten at least half (and probably more) of everything you learnt in the previous year at high school. That's all the stuff you need as the base for your first year at uni. So you'll be starting at a disadvantage, and if you're unlucky then you may never completely catch up.
Grab.