College, University, Gulag, what have you

You might be able to get BOTH. Some colleges require a person to travel to some place for a semester or year as part of the degree. Perhaps you can find a place you can go, learn and help, that a college/university would be OK with you going to and that could count to your degree. It would also be good to put on your application.

There is also the prospect of studying abroad. Not easy to balance studying abroad while travelling all around the nearby area, but it is doable and you still get both.

How ya doing, buddy?

As another alternative, check into community colleges within your area and see if they have any special agreements with universities in your state.

There are some advantages and [possible] disadvantages.

For advantages, you can get your gen ed taken care of, and get an associates degree. That way, if you REALLY dislike it, you'll be done in two or two and a half years, tops. Furthermore, you'll have SOME sort of a degree out of it all.

More so, you'll have SOME of your education done with if you choose to move onto a university (especially if there is an agreement going on between the communicty college and your university). I was very lucky in that the university I wanted to go to had just made an agreement with my community colleges to 1) allow automatic entry to anyone with at least a 3.0 G.P.A. and 2) not have you pay the initial application fee.

some other advantages are, from my experience, the books are FAR cheaper, the classes are FAR easier and LESS time consuming, and you'll have FAR more time to work a part time (or perhaps full time) job, be with your friends, etc. You might even find some classes at night, or in your own town (my community college had local centers in which the class room as literally a five minute drive away).

Now, some of the disadvantages, or at least things to watch out for.

Most of it all resolves around the classes you take, and when you select your major. IT also resolves keeping in contact with the university (or universities) you wish to go to. If there is no agreement between the university and college you wish to go to, then some classes may not be counted, and/or you may have to retake some of the classes. Furthermore, realize that community colleges are easier because they have lower level classes. I had to take Statistcs and Calculus all over again because the level I took before was too low. They counted at my university, but as a lower level course (which would have actually be OK for me with respect to my major, but for my minor, they were just too low).

Realize that you may have to take an extra semester, or even an extra year, due to the classes you have to take (some you can only take once per year and are requirements before you can take higher level classes). You MIGHT be able to take a course that can be transfered in, but if not, you may have a semester or two where you are literally take two or three courses because you're not allowed to take the other courses yet. Case in point, there were two courses you HAD to take at my university to be a computer science major, and you HAD to take those two first BEFORE you could take any other courses. I was lucky in that I was able to take my minor courses in the meantime to finish my minor, but my third semester I was only able to take three courses (the three allowed once you two the two aforementioned courses) that semester. DUe to this, and other reasons (which I will mention) I had an extra year I had to go.

Now, the other main reason/disadvantage is that when you go to a university for four or even five years, your classes, including your major, minor and gen ed's are mixed together so you don't have TOO many heavy courses at one time. Some semesters may have a heavier work load, but it is a bit more evenly distributed. In my case though, I only focused on my CS courses and Math courses, resulting in the situation in once semester getting three super hard, heavy workload classes. In fact, I would have gotten four (in fact, the four heaviest workload classes in the major) all at once had the professor not decided to teach one of them again the following semester.

Now, while we all do want to graduate as quickly as possible, there comes a point where you have to realize that such a work load may be so huge that it would overall hurt the quality of your work, and grade in all those classes. So that may mean you have to divide the classes up more and stay an extra semester.

In my case, I found out I would have had to stay no matter what for an extra year. In fact, my final semester, I could have had only a SINGLE class (there seemed to be no real way to get around that), but it may be different for you.

Another thing to keep in mind, which is something else I had to do for my final semester. keep in mind that if you are gettn gstudent loans, they only work at half time at best. So, if you find (like me) that you're going to have a semester with ONLY one class, you would be wise to rearrange things a bit to at LEAST have two classes (6 hours) or whatever it is that represents half time at your college.

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