Dilemma

I got two letters from Embry Riddle today. The first one is an offer letter while the second one is a document detailing the amount of credit hours which have been accepted by the university. The first letter explained that instead of waiting until August, I could choose to start my education on the 25th of June. The second letter detailed that only 34 of my existing credits have been accepted. By the end of my current semester, that number would rise to 39. And to put it all into perspective, for a typical year at college, one does anywhere between the range of 24 to 32 credit hours. I have spent 2 years at INTI and all I could muster was around 44 credit hours. This means that I average out at about 22 credit hours per semester and when I put it into perspective, the 44 I earned sounds like a huge failure. And to make matters a little more interesting, only 39 has been accepted and to successfully complete a degree in Aerospace Engineering, I need a total of 129 credit hours.

Now I know that you must be wondering, how come I only have 44 credits instead of 60? As much as I don't want to point fingers, I really feel that the blame really lies in the quality of the college. When I first started at INTI, I really wanted to take as many credit hours as possible but as my time at college went on, I realized that this was not possible. It was not because I didn't want to but its simply because no matter how much I wanted to factors beyond my control stopped me from earning more credits.

The first reason is because the quality of the lecturing as well as the syllabus for engineering subjects at INTI are substandard at best. The lecturers are ill equipped to deal with the rigours of explaining the complexities of engineering concepts to its students. Furthermore, many of the lecturers do not understand the American way of learning and often use Malaysian methods to teach. What I mean by Malaysian methods is that the lecturer hardly engages the students, reads from a book and they hardly make an effort to ensure that the students has understood what has been taught and as a result of this, many students find it very difficult to cope with the lectures. And to solve this problem, the lecturers often resort to unorthodox methods such as the handing out of tips to the students. They literally tell them what to study and what to expect for their exams. And when this happens all the confused students will ever bother to do is to study the tips and disregard the core objective of actually learning the subject with an intention of applying it in the next level or whenever they need to. And this produces students with substandard knowledge of a certain subject and therefore giving a false impression of the results that they got for their exams. And having realized all of these, I decided that it is best not to waste my money doing subjects here because when the dust finally settles, I will come to find that I didn't actually learn anything. And this has cost me at least 15 to 20 credit hours. Which translates to almost one year of work. But even if I did choose to waste my money, it would be pointless because the university wouldn't accept those credits anyways. So what this has done is that it has left me with a huge deficit and it left me with a whole lot of catching up to do which of course brings my focus back to to first letter.

As you may recall, I mentioned that the first letter is an offer letter which allowed me to start my semester in June which will allow me to catch up on the deficit by as much as 6 credit hours. I'm currently putting some very serious thought into this opportunity. If I ultimately choose to accept this offer, next month could very well be my last month in Malaysia for a very, very long time. But that's perhaps the least of my concerns at the moment. What I'm more concerned about is the amount of time which I would need to do all the necessary preparations and not to forget the extra cost which I have to incur. What should I do? Should I start now and finish early or should I start later and end up having to work round the clock in order to graduate by spring of 2010?