Lucky you- my 4.5 or 5 credit classes were three hours a week of lectures plus a 1 hour recitation and three hours lab. ( the recitation and lab were usually a four hour block)
Is a recitation like a weekly review session with a TA?
Started university at 17. Interspersed some military and interstitial jobs, and graduated a little after my 24th birthday.
Pretty much - although I’m not sure I would call it a review exactly. The lecture classes were typically huge lectures with at least a couple of hundred people that didn’t allow for questions - those had to be asked in the recitation, which was much smaller, maybe 20 people.
Same thing at Texas A&M- they’d stagger the registration times by last name- A-H at 5 am, I-P at 8 am and Q-Z at 11 am or something like that, with the groups to change times the next semester.
In general if you were in the first group, you could get the courses and sections you wanted. Second group always got the courses, but not always the sections. Third group sometimes couldn’t even get the courses. In general, this was only for first/second year courses or required stuff for multiple majors- upper level courses for a major were never particularly difficult to get into. But if you needed say… organic chemistry, you might be out of luck that semester and need to play schedule-Tetris to see what you could fit in.
I think I may have been delayed by a semester overall because of this- not immediately, but more because I didn’t tetris my schedule right in the first couple of semesters, and ended up needing a particular chain of courses as prerequisites and couldn’t get all of them in one semester, meaning that before I could progress in my major, I needed one more prerequisite. Had I done it right to begin with, I’d have been a semester ahead. I didn’t have to pad out my schedule with garbage courses or anything like that- it just meant that in my last year or so, I took a semester of 12 hours rather than 15-16.
- Did the usual go to college right after high school thing. I had to graduate in summer though, because I did a double major and they discovered at the last minute that I couldn’t count a course towards both general studies and one of my majors.
If I was doing it all over, I definitely would take a gap year and would have gone to a different school and never worked. But that’s all in the past.
My school, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (CA), had a similar thing - you registered under the priority system, from 1 to 9. 1 was usually for incoming freshmen in their first quarter (don’t want to spook 'em too early) and they cycled everyone else through the others. If you got a low priority number, you could usually get most of your courses. If you got a high one…good luck, and hope you like taking totally meaningless courses or very specific major-related stuff. Somebody at the school even started a band called “Ninth Priority” back then. A lot of students didn’t graduate on time because they had bad luck with priority and couldn’t get their general-ed courses.
I think they use a different system now, but that one sucked.
Reminder: “credit hours” is not a standardized measure. The numbers can be all over the place. 3 or 4 credit hours for a 3 hour a week class. Quarters vs. semesters require a factoring. And some places are just plain different. E.g., one place I knew of had a class = 1 credit per semester. So you’d be earning 6 to 8 credits per year.
And this naturally effects how many are needed for graduation. 100, 120, 180? Whatever.
(I used to volunteer to be my department’s transfer credit approval person. Easy job once you learn the ropes and better than other duties I might be assigned. So I saw a lot of variation and had to regularly figure out the number of credits that could be transferred as well as comparing classes.)
19, in 1981 (USA). I skipped my first and last years of school. My junior year of high school, my girlfriend dumped me and I got an opportunity to start college a year early, so what was the point of sticking around?
I know that many kids who skip a grade have problems because of the age difference, but after skipping first grade I quickly identified with the kids a year older than me and I didn’t look as young as I was, so they accepted me. I suppose I was lucky that it was never a problem. (My girlfriend was actually two years older than me, she was a grade ahead. Ultimately I married a woman 3 years older than me.)
25 a couple of years ago in 2017. Was close to going to a Public Ivy when I got out of high school in 2009 (there’s only two of them in CA, so if you guess which one you’ll have a 50/50 shot of being right), but the tuition was still too high and the lack of parental support and nonexistent financial aid (whether federal/state or the paltry amount the school itself offered) put that option to bed.
Took a couple years out of school and enrolled in the local JC. I graduated from there with two AAs in 2014 and then finished up at a podunk CSU 2.5 years later. The second time around I actually got a ton of aid and scholarships and finished up debt free.
So far my degree has proven to be basically worthless, and I’ve since flirted with the idea of going to law school or getting some kind of trade degree, but honestly I just am burnt out of school after all this time and I’m dubious if I will ever go back. I much prefer working and making money.
I’m not going to repeat the story I told elsewhere, but I took 4.5 years, 3 as a part-time student working (at least in theory) full-time and then a year and a half of full-time to finish. IIRC, graduation was a week or so after my 22nd birthday. I then took 3.5 years to finish my Ph.D., aided by the fact that that last .5 undergraduate year included 3 full graduate courses (for which I got 4.5 credits each, which barely allowed me to finish the required 120 credits.
I worked my way through school and took way longer than my peers in my high school graduating class to finish. I had to attend part-time at a community college first, and then transferred to a 4-year university where the only financial aid I qualified for were loans, which took me nearly a decade to pay off. It took nearly 8 years start to finish, and I lived at sub-poverty income during that whole time. I still wish like hell I could have go for a post-grad program, but between finances and life happening, I never had the chance. Just getting a BA was hard enough.
I still haven’t gotten one, having attended college in Spain back when we didn’t have 4-year degrees (now we do; their English name is the somewhat-inconvenient “Degrees”). My tertiary-education was 7 theoretical years (5 of coursework followed by 2 of research), most people who actually finished* took 9, I did it in 8 so I was actually ahead of the curve.
- The First year was “selective”. One third of students never reached Second. About another 10% never finished for whatever other reasons.
24, because I took two years off between high school and college, working the near-minimum-wage jobs that convinced me that I didn’t want to work near-minimum-wage-jobs ever again. I took two semesters off during college, but then I had some AP credit, and I took classes one summer, and graduated in exactly four years without a credit to spare.
Our university would let you take 12 credit hours and not kick you out of the dorms/pull your financial aid, but the expectation was that you’d take 16 credit hours per semester. Conversely, you were allowed to take 20 credit hours if your advisor would sign off on it, but you were expected to take 16.
Quite the celebration!
I had a friend in HS who’s mom died at Mt St Helens, she had a house on the slopes and was one of the people that didnt’ make it out of the pyroclastic fallout.
I worked in a restaurant kitchen, started out as a kitchen monkey in early mornings, 0600 to 1000 and then had classes, and as my school schedules and work schedules changed I progressed in the kitchen learning and working different jobs. I also had classes in the summer ‘off semester’ so I did classes all year around. I had a trust fund that paid for my whole college experience, the job was for spending money and to keep me sane. I fell into kitchen work because I had friends in HS that worked in restaurants and a job opened up so I took i so I could have time with friends without losing study time.
That was the same at my school, although we didn’t do “credit hours,” just “credits.” You were expected to take 4 credits per trimester/quarter; you could take 5 if your advisor allowed it; 3 was minimum to be considered “full time.” I had a few quarters where I dropped a class and was down to 3. My spring quarter before graduation, though, I still needed two credits to graduate. My financial aid was up, because I had taken 4 years’ worth of classes but, luckily, as I only needed two more credits (equivalent of 8 credit hours elsewhere), I was a “part-time” student, and only had to pay half the normal tuition. If I were one more credit short, it would’ve been an extra $10K.
Wow, we have a lot of early achievers here. One-third of people who voted in the thread, got their degree at age 21 or earlier.
That doesn’t seem odd to me. If you took a a straight path from kindergarten through 4 years of college without taking time off, somewhere around 1/3 should graduate at 21 (college graduation is typically around early-to-mid May; cutoff dates for elementary schools is typically early Sept or Oct.) I was a July baby, so I would have been 21 if I had not taken most of a year off of school. Twenty and under twenty is early achieving; twenty-one probably is a mostly people graduating “on time.”
Yeah, the funny thing for me about college is that, due to the gap years between high school and university that I took I wound up as one of the oldest people in my cohort (not the oldest as somebody who graduated with me was in his late 50’s - already retired and didn’t need the degree for anything other than as a bucket list item); when I was in K-12 school I was usually one of the youngest students.