Going into my senior year of high school, I was repeatedly told that one thing would look amazing on my resume for college: dual enrollment at a college or university. Believing this, I applied and was accepted into the DCPS Dual Enrollment program at Georgetown University. As I look back after a semester of being in both high school and college, I am here to question if it was truly worth it.
At Georgetown, I took a small class called “Women and Goddesses of India” with about 15 students, all of whom were sophomores or juniors at Georgetown. In the three months I was enrolled, I had some great experiences in the class. Being in a small class allowed for more hands-on discussions and a stronger relationship with the professor, which is not always the case in college courses. People in the class knew I was in high school and were super friendly and cordial.
However, I was woefully unprepared for a college class. The class met twice a week, and I had about 30-40 pages of reading due for each class. There was an extreme amount of information I had to take in, and I often found myself struggling to catch up on all of my homework. I would spend hours doing tumultuously long readings for Georgetown and still have tons to do for my high school classes.
High school just doesn’t prepare us for college-level writing. Do those APUSH DBQs seem hard now? Just wait until you have to write a paper where you have to think outside of the box and come up with your ideas. I wrote three papers for the class, and the amount of outside research and additional reading needed to get a basic understanding of the paper’s subject was ten times harder than anything I had to do in high school. The AP framework that we live and breathe at Jackson-Reed is all going to go out the window when you step into a college classroom.
I say this not to scare anyone off of college. I truly believe the workload will be more manageable once you do not have to juggle APs, extracurriculars, and college applications. However, being in high school full-time and taking on an additional class is a lot. Dual enrollment is great if you have a lighter load senior year, but if you still plan to take multiple APs and commit to extracurriculars, it may not be beneficial for your health.
Everyone has a different experience with dual enrollment—this was just mine! It is truly a unique experience that we are lucky to have in DCPS to experience college, for free, I might add, before we graduate. But what I will say is that it isn’t the necessity that I thought it was. At the end of the day, Jackson-Reed still gave me all the opportunities to build a great resumé and application for college.
