 In this video I'm going to be talking about how you can get a science education degree in as little as one year. Now this particular science education degree is going to be a bachelor's degree, it's going to be a bachelor's of science specifically, and it is going to be secondary earth science. And the way you get this is by going to a university that uses what's known as competency-based education. And this is basically the opposite of traditional university where they make you go to four years of college, whether the bachelor's degree is really difficult or it's easy. They basically try to fit everybody into this four-year university model. And for some degrees this totally makes sense. For instance, engineering degrees typically are going to take you at least four years to get. But the average bachelor's degree in the United States of America takes 5.1 years on average. And there are many bachelor's degrees out there that realistically speaking should not take that long. And so if you are somebody who already has a lot of experience or you're somebody who just wants to go that extra mile and pass the classes as quickly as possible and be tested on your competency, rather tested on how much time you spend at the university, then this can be a phenomenal option for you. Now the strategies that I'm going to reveal to you in this video up to this point, I've only shared with my paid consulting clients. But the series of videos that I'm doing right now were highly requested, and so that's what I'm doing. I'm sharing this all with you for free. And if you appreciate that, go ahead, gently tap that like button, and let's jump into it. All right, so this is a four-step process and it's very important that you don't skip any of the steps. You do this exactly as I say in this video. There may be people that you talk to at the universities that you go to that tell you, oh, that's not necessary. And you have to realize that these people sort of have a financial incentive to get you to enroll in the university as fast as possible because the universities will make more money that way. So step number one is going to be go ahead and transfer in all of your existing credits. Now, this does sound pretty straightforward, but the great thing about going to competency-based university such as WGU, and WGU is Western Governors University for those who aren't aware, is that they tend to be very gracious about the credits that they accept. So in some cases, along with accepting all the usual stuff like AP, IB classes, any college credit you have, as well as CLEP exams and other exams like that that you can take to test out of classes, they also accept certificates and certifications, work experience, and sometimes military experience as well. So make sure you get all of your information together, get your transcript, your resume, your experience together, send that into your enrollment counselor at WGU, and they will tell you what classes you can transfer in, you transfer those in, and then you're going to get a list of classes left that you still have to take. And at this point, you are going to go ahead and move on to step number two, which is the most important step, and that is you are going to use third-party companies to test out of many of the remaining classes. Now, for this particular degree, it's going to be about 39 classes to get your bachelor's. And using these third-party companies like study.com, Sophia.org, or straighterline.com, you can very comfortably test out of one class per week, even if you're super busy, you have a full-time job, and a family. If you have more time, you can do it a lot faster than that, especially with the entry-level classes. In many cases, people are able to test out of like one per day, sometimes even multiple per day. Now, the reason you're going to use these third-party companies and you're not going to just enroll in WGU right away is very simply because it's faster, easier, and cheaper, right? Those are three pretty good reasons. Now, my personal favorite to use is study.com, followed by Sophia.org. And then the third best one, in my opinion, is straighterline.com. But that could change in the future. Study.com is just the one that myself, as well as other people I've talked to that are really good at doing this and have worked with a ton of different people doing this exact thing. That's the one they have the least amount of issues with, and it's just the smoothest. Now, I do have a cheat sheet, which makes this entire process super easy. It maps out the exact class you can take at study.com with the exact course that you might take at WGU, for instance. And, you know, you can use other schools as well. You can kind of just replace it if you'd like. And that cheat sheet I will put down in the description as well as the pinned comment below, so definitely check it out. Now, once you've tested out of all these classes, of course, you're going to transfer them into WGU or whatever competency-based university you are going to. And then you're going to move on to step number three, which is you are going to pre-study the remaining classes. Now, this is the step that so many people skip, and I highly recommend not skipping this step. The two resources you really want to leverage in order to figure out the best ways to study for the remaining classes are going to be the WGU subreddit and WGU Facebook groups. On both of these resources, there are a ton of people that are doing the exact same thing that you're doing, and there are specific subreddits and Facebook groups for the specific degree that you're going to try to get as well. So these are people who are in the trenches. They either just took the classes or they're currently taking the classes and they share tips, tricks, strategies, and ways to pass the test as fast as possible. So highly, highly recommend that a lot of the time they will tell you, like, hey, this YouTube channel is really good or this blog is really good. Sometimes they'll recommend Khan Academy. Udemy can have some really good cheap classes as well. There's free textbooks online. There's paid textbooks online. You can order physical textbooks in real life for relatively cheap on Amazon.com. So yeah, there's a lot of good resources for this but definitely leverage those two that I talked about, the WGU subreddits and the Facebook groups. Now, if you're super busy, you don't want to study all the classes. At least study the harder ones, right? And again, that's something that they will share on those two resources that I recommended. Now, the reason that you are pre-studying is because WGU is going to make you pay per term and each term is six months and each term costs around $3,500 to $4,000 depending on the degree that you're getting. So for instance, let's say you took two terms and unfortunately you still have like three classes left and it's only gonna take you an extra month to finish those three classes. Well, unfortunately you have to pay for an entire another term, right? So you would have to pay for three terms instead of two and that's why pre-studying is so important. So you don't find yourself in that situation where there's only a few classes that you have to take and you have to pay for an entire another term. So at this point, once you pre-studied, you feel confident and you have a good plan going in and you think that you can try to finish it in two terms. That's sort of the goal. You're gonna go ahead and move on to step number four, which is you are finally going to enroll in WGU and knock those classes out as fast as you possibly can. So this is where you'd go to your enrollment counselor, pretty self-explanatory, you'd tell them that you want to enroll and you would start taking the classes and get them out of the way as fast as possible. Again, use the same resources WGU subreddit and the Facebook groups. Now, realistically speaking, in terms of the time you are enrolled in WGU, it is very possible to finish this degree in two terms. If you're super busy, maybe it takes you three or four terms and the overall process with the study.com, pre-studying, et cetera, very likely you can do it in two years or less. And in some cases, people take this to the extreme and they're able to do it in one year or less. Now definitely leverage your WGU instructor. They're gonna assign somebody to you and you definitely want to be talking to them and especially get their help if you're taking like a more difficult class like earth science or pre-clinical experiences in science. But yeah, you should be able to knock them out relatively quickly. WGU is competency-based. There's tons of reviews online of people who have been able to knock these classes out pretty quickly and finish their degree in like one to two years, sometimes even less. So the overall strategy summary is going to be, one, transfer on your existing credits. Two, pre-game the courses using study.com. Three, pre-study the remaining courses. And then four, enroll in WGU and knock those classes out as fast as you possibly can. Now I'm gonna take you into the cheat sheet and we're gonna go through this entire process step by step and just break it down and make it super easy. All right, so we are now in the cheat sheet and I'll just go ahead and go over this really quickly. First thing you wanna do is file and then make a copy so you can go through this process yourself with your own unique situation. The one downside to making a copy is basically if I updated this in the future, so for instance, let's say study.com comes out with a new class, I update it. It's not gonna be on there if you make a copy. So definitely make sure you check the original copy as well but you won't be able to edit that of course. But over here on the left, we basically have the class ID numbers at WGU and then one column over. We have the course names at WGU and then I just had to adjust that. Here we have the units for each class and then in this column, this is probably the most important column by far, we have the study.com transfers. So just to make this extremely clear, the English 104 class which is study.com0057. If you take that class, you can transfer it in for English composition one. And then we also have some straighter line classes that study.com doesn't offer and again in the future, if there's any Sophia or straighter line classes that study.com doesn't offer or if they come out with other classes, we will very likely fill this in. Also, there are some classes that are a little bit easier at Sophia.org. So we're thinking about filling that in as well. So yeah, make sure you keep checking this in the future but I found that just keeping it simple and using study.com first and then Sophia.org and then straighter line is typically the way to go. But there are a few exceptions like with this straighter line.com class. So let's go ahead and move through these and go into the very first step which is you are going to go ahead and transfer in your existing credits. So in this particular case, I'm not sure why the formatting is off there but in this particular case, I'm just going to make this up. Of course, let's say you took AP biology and AP math during high school. So you were able to transfer those in and then you also took one semester at your local state college and you were able to transfer in communications, art and astronomy as well as this astronomy class too. And I think the formatting is messed up on this. I'll try to fix this before I actually post it. Sorry about that. But you'll go ahead, transfer those classes in then you'll move on to phase number two which is the test out phase. And this is where you test out of all the classes that you can test out of using study.com straighter line and Sophia.org. Now one thing I will mention generally speaking the green classes tend to be relatively easy. The yellow classes are a little harder and then the red classes are the hardest ones but that's just generally speaking, it's not always true. But with that being said, once you transfer these classes and it's going to look something like this this is basically the sheet that they would give back to you are very similar to that. So you basically don't even need to wait for it. You can just look at this and you would go ahead and move on to phase number three which is the pre-study phase. So you would pre-study all of these classes preferably and if you don't have much time you would pre-study maybe some of the more difficult ones. And then once you feel confident you would move on to phase number four which is you would enroll in WGU and knock these classes out as fast as you possibly can. Then you'd go ahead brag to all your friends, family, etc that you are a genius and you were able to knock out an entire bachelor's degree in one year and hopefully if you're nice you'll go ahead and share this video with them so that they can know how to do that as well. Now like I said before WGU is a great university but there's two things I want to mention really quickly. The first thing is there are other competency-based or accelerated universities where you can use these similar methods and I talk about this in other videos on my channel. And then the second thing is competency-based education is awesome but it's not for everybody. So there are going to be pros and cons of going to a school like WGU and I talk about that quite a bit on the channel as well but obviously one of the things is it's completely remote so if you have trouble studying remotely at your house probably not the best thing for you. Another thing is the network is going to be relatively weak because it's not in person. So if you want to know all the pros and cons of WGU as well as alternatives to WGU other really good competency-based universities check this video out right here because I go into that in detail.