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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?"
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!
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.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.