Rethinking TESC, considering Excelsior: Degree Plan: BA Humanities (comm conc.)?

[Leherself]

For competitive grad schools, especially in medical fields, they will often calculate your GPA for you - they don't rely on the GPA that might or might not be on your graduating transcript. I'm not terribly familiar with the admissions process for OT, but I am very familiar with the one for PT, and I can't imagine they're terribly different. For the vast majority of PT schools you submit your transcripts via PTCAS (there's also an OTCAS, which I assume operates similarly - from this link it seems very similar https://portal.otcas.org/applicants2013/...gpas.shtml). PTCAS requires you to enter every single college course that you've ever taken that appears on any college transcript anywhere, and they generate your overall and pre-requisite GPAs from that information. This means that everyone's GPA is created using a standardized formula, and includes all of your college credit. So if you retook classes to get a better grade? Both of those grades now apply to your GPA, regardless of the original school's policies. You transferred to a new school and a lot of old, bad credit didn't transfer so your current GPA is much higher? Sorry, that old, bad credit is going to come back to bite you.

So, in other words, it doesn't matter what big three school you go to. You're probably going to have to submit all of your individual transcripts from wherever you got your credits originally in order to apply anyway. It's important to have a good number of graded credits in general, and you need to have excellent pre-requisite grades. Also consider that you probably need to get a very solid scientific background under your belt (physics, biology, chemistry, anatomy & physiology, etc.), and many schools prefer that those classes be taken in person, with live labs, at a B&M school (I know several PT schools that specify that science labs cannot be tested out of, and cannot be from online courses).

My advise? Get your degree wherever, because it doesn't really matter where most OT schools are concerned. Your major doesn't matter. You need a degree to check that particular box, and that's it.

What *does* matter is making your GPA as amazing as you possibly can. Not your school GPA - your overall undergraduate GPA including every college class you've ever taken in your life. When I was still looking into PT, my desired school had a minimum overall GPA requirement of 3.25... but their actual admitted average GPA? 3.89. OT is an equally competitive field. Also make sure that you get a very good background in the specific courses that schools are looking at for pre-requisites. Pre-requisite courses are often calculated as a separate gpa, and you want that to be as close to a 4.0 as possible. An option you might want to look into is to finish your bachelors and then enroll in a pre-med post-bacc program.

You should probably do a survey of ten or so prospective OT schools and find out what their admissions requirements are. What are the pre-requisite course requirements? What are the GPA requirements? Do they use OTCAS? How many volunteer hours do they need in an OT clinic? How many letters of reference? Etc. etc. That'll all give you a much better idea of the specific things you need to do to prepare for that sort of admissions process.

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As far as your actual degree plan goes, it looks like you've got some odd things?

A depth is 12 credits in one academic discipline - your first depth proposed is just a bunch of random classes. Also, for a BA at Excelsior both depths have to be in an Arts and Sciences area - I'm pretty sure your proposed second depth doesn't work either, because those will probably be considered applied technical credits.

Principles of Public Speaking DSST is not an upper level exam.

Honestly, if you're already in a degree program at TESU, stay there. TESU's humanities program is very flexible, and doesn't require that many upper division credits. Excelsior's requirements for their humanities degree are more strenuous, and in a way that's not going to get you any closer to your goals.