Advice on max CC credits (majority through dual enrollment)?

This forum made possible through the generous support of SDN members, donors, and sponsors. Thank you.

thereminiscent

New Member
Joined
Feb 13, 2024
Messages
1
Reaction score
0
Hi everyone, I just wanted a bit of advice about a weird situation I have! Any advice would be appreciated.

I went to an underserved high school where we only had 10 teachers and 9 classrooms with a very unique mission statement where we were pushed to take community college courses through dual enrollment and even had the opportunity to graduate with our Associate Degree concurrently with our high school diploma. We were built inside a community college for that purpose and had a strong partnership with them. I ended up obtaining 3 of my Associate degrees the week before my high school graduation, obtaining 42 units. The majority of these classes were nonadjacent to the dental school prerequisites. For example, because our school was so small, we did not have PE facilities. Instead we were sent to the college to take 1 unit Kinesiology courses that are the equivalent of a PE curriculum. I took my language requirements at the college, along with extraneous classes like stats, anthro, socio, psych, music theory, voice, biopsych, and more.

After graduating, I enrolled into a T25 university as a journalism major that was undecided about pre-health. I took one generic pre-health science course every semester, because this is all the room I had to complete the prehealth track. My senior year of university, I decided that I wanted to go the pre-dental route and began shadowing and really committing to it post-graduation. The problem is that because of my major and my minor, I was only able to take the general biology series, general chemistry series, organic chemistry series, and biochem at my four year institution. I couldn't afford to take the remainder of the prerequisite classes at a four year or extend my time because I work to help support my parents financially. I ended up returning to CC and completing both physics, microbio, A&P, and calculus, along with 2 more prerequisites I was remediating from college (due to a P/F grading option and a C- in ochem b).

I'm getting extremely worried because I thought that I would be at about the max limit of CC credits that most schools place. But I realize now that combined with the random courses I took in high school, I now have 84 CC credits. This is on top of ~120 University units that I acquired in my four years as a journalism/pre-health major and global health minor— this places me at a total of about 200 units including CC and University. Does anyone have any insight or advice on what happens now? I've only taken about 45 units towards my dental prerequisites and this is well below the 60 unit limit that most schools have. Will my application be thrown out immediately just from the sheer amount of community college credits I've racked up since I was 14 years old (courses that are irrelevant to the track I'm on now)? Would it help to explain the situation somewhere on my application? Any advice is appreciated, thank you!

TLDR breakdown of the units:
42 CC units: dual enrollment (nonrelevant to predental track)
120 University units: journalism major, global health minor, pre-health (1/2 of prerequisites)
42 CC units: DIY post bacc (1/2 of prerequisites)

Members don't see this ad.
 
Last edited:
The CC credit hours cap is intended for prerequisites. Usually organic and biochemistry at CCs cannot transfer to 4 year institutions so check if yours is rigorous enough. Same thing with upper level bio classes like microbio for science majors and physiology.

Ask the schools where you want to attend.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: 1 user
Top