Yo. I'm transferring from CC to real university with junior level standing in physics

Yeah, I'm thinking I'll at least take some graduate level classes senior year if I can't take then junior year.

Does anyone know if you're required to take classes in a PhD program or can you test out of them and go straight to research?

it will primarily depend on whether he's a cool dude or not.

Also: prerequisites. You may have to convince him that you read what you read.

>I'm transferring from CC
I read that as I am transitioning to a female.

I think I like traps too much

Wasn't a problem to get into grad level courses, but my uni wouldn't let them count for grad level degree if you stayed for your masters, you'd have to take some other shit, kinda lame. Luckily i left that shit, and went somewhere else.

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mathfag here, so your milage may vary (in particular, science courses have lab experience and other shit they care about as well).

For transferring, you will likely never actually talk to anyone about it directly. You'll just apply, get an acceptance letter with some instructions about how to register, and be expected to register for classes like a normal student.

For grad courses, you will likely have to get special permission (not because you're from a CC but because you're an undergrad). At my university this involves getting permission from the professor and the department (the department usually doesn't give a fuck and just acts as a sanity check). Professors will vary from those who are just excited to have you in the class to those who like to be hardasses and don't want you in there unless you have some proof that you'll meet their expectations. The courses will vary a lot as well, from courses that resemble those at the undergrad level with homeworks and assignments to courses where students take turns teaching the course (involves doing research as in reading textbooks and research papers, preparing lectures and lecture notes, answering deeper questions, etc..) to entirely different sorts of grad courses.

Most likely you'll run into issues with pre-requisites, as above you will have to get special permission to override those (again from both the department and the professor). Whether or not they allow it will likely depend on lab experience (I doubt they'll grill you on your actual knowledge, they'll probably just take your word for it on that).

You may want to avoid mentioning to your peers that you transferred in from a CC. While professors and such won't give a fuck, students tend to have a stigma against it. That said, you're knowledge base will likely be comparable to theirs with maybe some differences in emphasis (since CC's have two year programs they're sometimes more geared towards hands on practical experience than formal theory).

just be yourself :^)

who is this semen demon

>How common is it for a university to let undergrads take graduate classes?
Fairly common, I did it for math and all it took was a quick form signed by the professor. Keep in mind that most grad students take like 3 courses a semester, so the workload might be a bit much. If you're willing to get through that, though, it's easily possibly to do quite well.

I think most profs will be chill about it and be impressed that you want to challenge yourself. They'll also give you realistic expectations on the prerequisite knowledge you should have coming in.

Never heard of self teaching yourself out of a pre-req, you'd probably have to convince someone, whoever teaches that course that you are a genius, to go through all the bureaucratic fuckery to do such a thing.

If you can self teach yourself inbetween research and work terms then do it regardless.

There are ways you can take graduate level courses at the undergraduate level.

Integrated masters programs let you do grad courses in undergrad, if you maintain a high gpa and impress the profs, mine has you do 2 graduate eng courses in 4th year on top of the reg eng courses.

>You may want to avoid mentioning to your peers that you transferred in from a CC.

I concur with this. This was a huge (and well-deserved) stigma at the university that I taught at.

The main problem was that there was a ridiculous process for deciding which CC courses were "equivalent" to which university courses. That process was highly political, and it resulted in CC students getting credits for university courses that were much more advanced than the courses they had actually taken at CC. We'd get those CC students transferring in -- and then they would start taking upper-level classes right away and be completely lost. The correlation between "CC" and "flunk out" was extremely high.

It was really sad, because the CC students were the big losers in all of this. They got tricked into thinking their CC courses actually prepared them for upper-level uni courses. But in reality, their CC teachers were often barely competent, because the insanely low pay at CC drove out all the good teachers. That was particularly noticeable in computer science (my department), because it's so easy for a good CC computer science teacher to quadruple their salary overnight by going into industry as a software engineer.

Please deliver OP

Email the department adviser. Real university is a step up above CC so they might want to see you perform in undergrad QM/Thermal and get an A before letting you into graduate courses.

It was the opposite at my university.

CC:
>professors whose main job is to teach (i.e. not do research, supervise students, and apply for grants)
>higher workloads
>more content covered
>smaller classrooms with some profs doing extra lectures to help the kids understand

University:
>Lecturer who is a PhD student/Post Doc/just starting out as a prof and has a lot of extra responsibilities aside from teaching
>Undergrad student acting as the TA
>Just a few assignments and maybe two exams (with similar examples given during class/TA/sample tests).
>300+ student lectures with smaller TA lectures

Of course, I wouldn't recommend this model for any of the remaining courses taught only at a university (third year and onward) but it gave kids solid foundations in first and second year courses.

I think the biggest issue is that standards between CC's and Universities can vary a lot and it certainly doesn't help that CC's are designed to give associate degrees, not to transfer to universities.

At the end of the day though, any stigma should be issued on a student by student basis, not based on where one studied. I'm sure we have all seen countless university students who manage to pass with good marks despite being total retards by simply memorizing the right shit (as opposed to obtaining a real understanding of the subject matter).

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You raised some good points. (I'm the guy you responded to.)

> it certainly doesn't help that CC's are designed to give associate degrees, not to transfer to universities.

In some states, students are given a promise that if they spend their first two years at CC, then certain courses will count when they transfer to a university for their final 2 years, and they're guaranteed university admission to complete those final 2 years. The state actively encourages students to do it this way -- usually to relieve campus overcrowding.

> any stigma should be issued on a student by student basis

That's definitely the way it should be. But when you're in a system where:

1: CC admission standards are very low,
2: University admission standards are very high,
3: The state encourages students to spend their first 2 years (of 4) at CC,
4: The state guarantees year-3 university admission to students who do it that way.
5: Political forces result in a poor mapping of CC courses to uni courses.
6: Political forces result in CC salaries getting aggressively slashed.

Then you have a recipe for disaster. I had the bad luck to be in such a system, and to teach at one of the most popular universities where admission standards needed to be set high.

Objectively perfect body.

Do graduate classes usually have a grading curve?

It's pretty common. Most decent undergrads should take all the 1st and 2nd year graduate courses, through QFT, in undergrad.

Sort of? It's hard to get less than a B. They're easier than undergraduate courses, at least in physics imo

It's kind of common, if you are like top 10-25% smth of your class in undergrad you could probably do a graduate course or two last semester or year of undergrad.