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University of Virginia Student Graduates in One Year
An anonymous reader writes "18-year-old David Banh of Annandale, VA recently graduated from the University of Virginia with a double major in Physics and Mathematics, and an education paid for almost entirely by scholarships. What's truly amazing is that he did it in one year, bringing in 72 Advanced Placement credits, then taking 23 credits his fall semester, 37 credits his spring semester and 3 credits in the summer. His brief undergraduate career didn't leave him much time to explore college, so he's now working on his master's degree. He says he may eventually pursue law school as a part-time student in hopes of becoming a patent lawyer."
Jesus! I recently returned to finish my degree, and 18 hours plus 20 hours of working is kicking my ass a little bit.
Missed the point? I figured he was just getting the bullshit over with as quickly as possible!
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
as I did with mine. I intentionally stayed in college 6 years*(1.5 of those were spent doing internships) because I wanted to explore everything there was. My AP credits allowed me to get a lot of stuff out of the way so I could explore. I took an internship at a steel mill and worked at an R&D Lab in Japan. I majored in computer engineering and minored in math and Japanese, and actually took a lot of other classes that I didn't have to take because I thought they were interesting. I have something like 32 credits that don't really "count" as it were, for my degree. I am sure as hell glad I took them though because I will probably never get another chance to take a class in world music or Japanese literature.
Those sure as hell don't help me on my job or in grad school next year, but I really felt like they helped me grow as a human being.
Monstar L
He should be pretty happy as a patent attorney. My brother-in-law does that, and the job doesn't leave a lot of time for a social life... which this kid obviously doesn't have, and certainly didn't learn anything about in his year at college.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I envy him coming from a school system that allowed him to get 72 AP credits. My high school, and every alternative within an hours drive, offered a grand total of SIX AP courses (including Music Theory, wtf?). They required you to take the class before you could take the test. And every one of them had pre-requisites within the normal high school curriculum, making all 6 an impossible combination.
I am also a bit skeptical about getting through all of college in what amounts to, at most, 5 'layers' of prerequisites, and that would be assuming he brought in two courses worth of AP credits in a particular subject (common at most institutions, a 5 on my AP Calculus exam got me credit for Calc I and Calc II), took another level of course in the fall and spring, and then took the final one as his single 3-hour summer course. All 3 of th universities I have attended had pre-requisite trees deeper than that for almost any normal degree, and more of them than would fit in his schedule anyways.
The double major in Physics and Math is a pretty smart choice, if I were to "twink" my college education like that. Most institutions allow AP credit to qualify for non-major related prerequisites (so you can focus on the "good stuff" instead of all that well-rounded stuff) and thus most of his high school AP credits may apply. A typical Math and/or Physics degree focuses on multiple subdisciplines that can be studied concurrently rather than in sequence. And, of course, a person with an aptitude in Math will find the coursework easy to digest and easy to take tests for (which inevitably involve solving problems rehashed in the coursework rather than coming up with novel solutions or proofs). In other words, if I was powerleveling through college (which is what he did), that's probably the route I would have taken.
Of course, with this current toon, I took the other route and only had 12 credit hour semesters and took a lot of extra-curricular cultural classes in music, literature, and sociology. Sometimes life is better when you stop and smell the roses.
I was going to say the exact same thing.
Racing through college like that just seems like wasted opportunities galore. Not only for the social interaction, which he almost certainly didn't get, but to take all sorts of other classes.
There are whole fields of study that I never would have had any clue about, except that I saw them in a course catalog when I was an undergrad and thought "what the hell, I'll take it." Economics, for example, is now a big interest of mine, and there's no way I would have taken it, if I had been just trying to bang out the minimum graduation requirements.
I wish this guy the best, but I think he's driving too hard and too fast for specialization. Even for a patent attorney, having some concept for things outside your area of interest is a good idea. That doesn't mean you need to take twelve credits of Underwater Basketweaving, just that there are a lot of things that you can learn about (particularly a big school like UVA), and it's a shame to pass up those opportunities, as they're rather difficult to come by later.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
What math/physics degree allows you to graduate with only 120 credits, 72 of them things that can even be counted from AP exams?
My engineering degree took 200 credit hours, including about 45 that I entered college with. Taking 37 hours in a semester would save you... half a year over my normal course load.
I mean, so AP can cover your intro pretty much everything... meaning that few of his classes were actually something high level AKA possibly challenging? I had a year and a half worth of math courses beyond what you can get with all possible AP credits.
I mean, awesome for him... but what the heck is the university even teaching in a degree that short?
I knew, the second I saw the headline, that it was a TJ grad. I could have easily spent another year at TJ after my senior year, and learned a hell of a lot more than I did during my first year (or two) of college. In fact, in my time at TJ (where I specialized in Physics), I learned more about computer science in passing than I have at the two universities I've attended for most of the past ten years (including a CS degree).
I'll be the first one to admit that chances are he missed out on a lot of fun college life, but sometimes you just have to do something "because you can". He's smart, and I'm sure he'll spend the next three or four years in grad school and law school, and he'll find time to have a little bit of fun while he's at it.
Congratulations to him, and remember, just because he's smarter than you (academically) is no reason to try and take away from his accomplishments just to make you feel better about yourself.
--brian, TJ '96
Having half of your credits come from freshman level courses doesn't seem the most appropriate method to getting an eduation.
Considering the pace and methodology, I'd say he wasn't interested in an education... he was there to get a degree.
And... it sounds like he will be the perfect lawyer.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
I always want to add something to the end - "When I became wise, I leanred the value of childish things and turned to them once more"
Try instead quoting a portion of this, written by a very well-known author and Christian apologist:
"Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
-- C. S. Lewis
Get laid as much as possible...you're peaking dude!! Fuck everything while it is still tight enough to *squeek*.
Party some too...while you're young enough that it doesn't hurt.
At least with this kid...he's gotten a lot of the important stuff out of the way....he could afford to slow down and experience some of the fun stuff in college. It is good to study, think ahead and do what your supposed to do, but, don't forget , you're young and you won't be forever...ENJOY it too.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
I agree with the spirit of your post 100% (that your parent poster is an elitist jackass), but just wanted to add a counter point. The BS classes he's talking about are the freshman and maybe sophomore intro courses, which don't even sniff the topics you mentioned. He's talking about skipping a semester of picking out the intersection of supply/demand curves and memorizing the definitions of elasticity and complimentary goods, full of the typical Greek business majors on their way to a Management degree. At that level, I have no problem calling it a BS course if you can demonstrate a mastery of the content on an AP exam.
I have found there are just two ways to go.
It all comes down to livin' fast or dyin' slow. -REK, Jr.
37 credits in a semester while getting mostly A's (which the article implied)? That's more than twice as many as the average student. I'm sorry, but you have to do more (or "have" more) than just study your ass off to take 72 credits worth of AP classes in 3 years in high school and then get a double-major in math and physics from a top university in a single year. Some of the replies here are amazing...it's almost like people are trying to just shove this aside and pretend they could have done this if they felt like it. Get a grip.
I'm a software engineer, and I find Economics to be a very interesting course also- but still bullshit. Economists have *NO* idea how to interpret data- they start with unreasonable assumptions then cherry pick the data that supports those assumptions, and call it a theory.
Which is how we start with David Ricardo's Assumption of Comparative Advantage and end with a $68 Billion/month trade deficit that has been getting worse every month for the past 30 years.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.