Monday, October 5, 2015

Wahoo!

Congratulations, Mxyl!

Last Friday, he was inducted into the National Society of Collegiate Scholars!

NSCS has been around a long time, but his college just opened their chapter, so he was in the inaugural class of inductees!


 I have to say, the homeschool-college crossover has gone really well for Mxyl.

What we did was to allow him to take classes at the local community college starting at 16.  In our
area, this is called dual enrollment, and you can get 50% off of tuition.

We start off with one class, then gradually add more so that they are ready for a full load when they actually graduate high school.  In Mxyl's case, he had 18 credits, which was why he was eligible for the honor society in what should have been his first semester.

Our original thought was to have him take all his basic classes, the ones he would need to take no matter what major he chose.  I'm so glad we didn't do that!

Instead, we encouraged him to take whichever random classes caught his interest.  He took all sorts of classes: photography, philosophy, 3D animation, and so on.  This scattershot approach really helped him decide what he wanted to do, and helped him choose his major.  Ironically, all the classes he took will actually fit in the major he chose (animation and multimedia)!

At this point, it looks like he will finish a professional certificate  next semester, and his AA degree one semester later.  And then he has automatic access to any of the 4 year state colleges as a junior.

For us, this is a triple win: he had a comfortable transition from a fairly unstructured high school experience into college, we skipped the college admissions angst, and we saved a ton of money both in the first two years of college, and in him finding something he's passionate about.

Well done, Mxyl!



2 comments:

Queen of Carrots said...

Congratulations! That's an interesting approach to class choice. Will have to start giving these things some thoughts before too long and it's more than a little scary.

Wendy said...

It's remarkable how fast it creeps up!