As a parent with a child soon to enter college, I’d just like to say that there is a world of difference between moving away to go to a college you’ve been accepted at and moving away to a new city with the hopes of eventually going to college. There is a structure and a kind of safety net in place at universities. Room and board are assured, as are the basics such as electricity, telephone, water, and garbage pickup. I would be extremely fearful if my son had plans such as your cousin’s. I can definitely see that there are benefits to her plan, but there are also quite a few drawbacks. Jobs are not always easy to come by, especially for a teenager, and life can be much harder as an independant adult than one would imagine as a teenager. I feel her parents are not unreasonable in being worried about her prospects.
Camden County College is in Blackwood, not Camden. It is a nice school in a nice area. I went there and found the classes much more challenging than those in the four-year school where I transferred.
CCC would be maybe a thirty-minute commute, depending on the route she takes.
LOL - that is sort of amusing 'cos to me over this side of pond, Camden is a failry intersting bit of london.
Anyway - Bre’r Lappin’s compromise sounds pretty good. Insofar as he seems to kow the place well enough to recommend it,a dn insofar as it means that both pareants and cousin are making a compromise. Parents might then be a bit more calm
Oh, and I an also believe bad stuff about scary girls - never had that trouble myself but you do hear of bad high schoools with vious girls in them 
(And, yes, I can believe they might be mroe vicous than boys fighting)
I do hope it works out. Sounds like a girl with sound thinking anyway. 
Taking the time to actually look at the site, there is a Camden campus. I don’t know about that one, but the Blackwood campus is very nice. The Blackwood campus would be closer to her also - she could take Rt 73 or the White or Black Horse Pikes to get there.
There’s also Stockton State College in Pomona, just outside of AC. I was a Bio major there, so I can’t speak for their physics program. It’s very student oriented with no fraternity or sororities on campus, no big sports programs. Although that may not appeal to everyone, it appealed to me quite a bit.
Can you tell I used to live in Jersey?
One thing she really needs to consider is the instate/out-o-state issue. Community college is really cheap if you’re instate. If you’re not, it can be a lot more expensive. In Florida, for instance, they require a year residency to qualify for instate tuition. And if you enroll as an out-of-state student, you can’t change it to instate after a year. You’d have to drop for a year and work full-time.
Harleen, she lives but five minutes away from Stockton, in Port Republic. However, it is too late for her to go there as classes start soon. You have all been very helpful and I’ll forward along these suggestions to her.
tremorviolet, I think she’s checked this out and told this to her parents, for whom tuition cost is not an issue.
So, start in the Spring. You don’t have to start college in the Fall, after all.
No one takes more than one class in their major their first year. Plus, CC will help get a lot of core credits out of the way, and it will show her parents that she is responsible and can take care of herself, etc.
I can personally testify that CCC to AC takes almost exactly one hour down the black horse pike, but that’s still relatively close.
CCC’s program outline for physics is on page 37 of this PDF: http://www.camdencc.edu/catalog_update_04_05/transfer.pdf
It appears pretty, uh, impressive, especially compared to ACC, famous for having little of anything.
PS Harleen - I’m a Bio major at CCC, looking to transfer to Rowan.
Criteria for independent student status for federal aid purposes:
If you meet the criteria for independent status, you only use your own income on the FAFSA. If you don’t, you have to use your parents’ also. I tried to get independent status when I went to college, because I was living on my own and getting no support from either parent, but I didn’t fit the definition. I did get some grant money anyway, since my dad was unemployed and my mom didn’t make that much, but I still had to take out loans.
I would second the Camdon suggestion, for tow reasons, Daytona is a long way from NJ, and have you every tried to find real estate in Daytona in October?
She would really want to go down there in May, after all the snow birds leave.
Egads, death threats? What the heck kind of high school did she go to?
If she’s like most physics majors she ought to be ready for advanced math and rigorous, college level science. Are these murderous girls from her HS likely to be taking those classes?
Unless, of course, they’re like that ‘tough gang of astrophysicists’ in the Gary Larson cartoon, who would ‘monopolize the telescope and intimidate the other researchers.’
Thanks P of S for some adult skepticism about the rampant Girl College Death Gangs of Doom. Do we have any cites about these evil chicks? Are they on every campus or do they only rule in NJ? I can’t imagine “death chicks” in Calculus or Physics at my campus. Maybe I just don’t recognize them. Do they have a tatoo or uniform. Maybe I’m just overlooking them.
PS Elle are you really your cousin? Just wondering.
Thanks for your help and advice, everyone. I’ll send these answers along to her right away.
To answer some of your questions:
Spectre, she went to a run-of-the-mill Catholic school. This type of behavior among girls happened when I was in high school too, and I’ve heard about it in other places as well. As for their majors, I have no idea, only that they’ll be attending and that she is dead set against attending.
And, no, PictsiePat, I am not my cousin. If I was, it’s logical to assume I would have said so from the start. A question to you: what’s your problem? Nothing in this thread has been particularly unbelievable or offensive, yet you’ve had nothing but negative or skeptical things to contribute.
…yeah…she’s an unemployed teenager with a high school degree who lives at home! 
Did you mean to call him that …cause it’s pretty funny.
I have to agree with some of the posters who recommended that just up and moving to florida with a HS diploma and a dream may not be the best way to go. My recommendation is to take some classes closer to home and save some money. She can always transfer to Florida after a couple semesters.
As for the South Jersey drama, I don’t really have an opinion other than there are a lot of schools in the tri state area.
Getting accepted for Spring session when you didn’t get accepted for Fall does happen, but not when you don’t go to some other school in the meantime. She wasn’t good enough the first time, why should the school accept her after six months of doing “nothing” (academically)? I think her chances of getting into this school are much lower than she thinks.
She should really find something to do in the meantime that looks GOOD on a college application. Take some classes somewhere. Enroll in a community college near Daytona. Go abroad for a few months and practice a foreign language. Volunteer somewhere. Work in a laboratory as a grunt assistant. Something, anything. Because “coffee jockey” doesn’t really impress the admissions board.
Also, her chances of getting a decent job in a college town in October are low. All of the college students will have already taken most of the jobs! She does have an advantage by being available to work full time instead of part time, but I’d still be pretty skeptical. Also finding housing might be an issue for the same reason.
She’d be better off manipulating her parents into funding some sort of alternative “adventure” for her to have abroad or taking some classes somewhere. I did this exact thing when I was 17. I told my parents I was either dropping out and moving out or they could send me abroad for the year. They chose to send me abroad. It ended up being the best thing for all of us. Sometimes parents need to be played.
There’s a fine line between “skeptic” and “asshole”. I would suggest you evaluate where your toes rest. However, in the interest of answering your questions, I will continue onwards and hope you’ll simply consider my suggestion before you post again.
Speaking from personal anecdotes, I know of at least two violent girls who roamed the halls of my very Catholic, very disciplined high school (both were in my class of 30). I can only imagine it gets worse in schools where security and restraint aren’t given quite as high a premium and drama levels are significantly elevated.
Beyond that, first of all many people have mentioned you don’t take many, if any classes in your major during your first quarter/semester. You take general requirements with every other type of major, plus some braindead course on the college itself. This means, depending on the size of incoming freshmen, she’s got a good chance of landing a class with at least one person she would very much like to avoid.
Second of all, they don’t build self-contained ghettos for the underwater basketweaving majors. People mix while wandering around campus, while getting lunch, while looking through the library…
In other words: if this is a small community college, or even a medium sized one, I would give her good odds of running into the gang of femme fatales.
sigh size of the incoming freshmen class. I would assume the size of incoming freshmen are about par for average. :smack:
sigh size of the incoming freshmen class. I would assume the size of incoming freshmen are about par. :smack: