 What's happening? It's Shane here and in today's video I am going to be sharing with you how I graduated with a doctorate in five years and nine months. This is going to be my personal story of how I was able to graduate with a doctorate much faster than the usual eight years. And I'm going to go over the six steps that I took in order to get there and you will be able to apply these steps to also shorten your college degree as well. And yes I know I have a baby face. A lot of people don't believe that I have a doctorate so I'll pop up a little clip on the screen that's showing my doctorate. So uh yeah here is my very expensive piece of paper. But before we get into that make sure to gently tap that like button. Let's set a goal of 2000 likes on this video. Also hit the subscribe button. I think at this time maybe 17 percent of you are subscribed and I think only 8 percent of you have rung the notification bell and turned on all notifications so come on guys we can do better than that. I actually don't know if that's good or not because I don't have access to other channels but but yeah it would be pretty cool if you did that thank you. So anyways getting started with the video number one on the list is going to be taking AP classes during high school. I took AP classes during high school and that way I was able to test out of a few classes that I would have had to have taken at the beginning of college. Now the first two years of college you're going to be taking a lot of what are known as prerequisite classes and these are basically usually they're kind of very general intro level classes where you're kind of getting a taste of this and a taste of that and you have to get them out of the way in many cases before you can take other classes that are going to be more specific to the major that you're going for. Now a lot of these classes can actually be tested out of even when you are in high school you can test out of them by taking AP classes as well as IB which is international baccalaureate. Oh and AP stands for advanced placement so I didn't have access to IB classes but I did have access to AP classes and so I was able to test out of a few classes and I didn't have to take them during college. Now other people I've known have taken this to the extreme they've done a bunch of different AP classes and they're practically able to test out of an entire semester or in some cases an entire year. Now to be fair I think there are smarter ways to go about doing it which I'm going to get to in a little bit later on in the video but this can still be a fantastic choice and it can save you a lot of time and money. Number two make sure to do your research okay so it's important to start trying to research different careers and different degrees etc that you want to do as early as possible. Now I made a video where I talked about how you can choose the perfect degree for you. I think that's one of the best videos I've made on the channel one of the most valuable. There's just so much packed into that video I highly highly recommend watching it but basically the earlier you figure out what major you want to choose as well as the career path you want to go down the easier everything is going to get right because if you have a goal right if you have this idea of what you want your future self to be it's so much easier to reverse engineer those steps and figure out the steps that you need to take in order to get there. However if you don't have a goal if you're kind of just doing things willy-nilly you're basically just like a leaf blowing in the wind and you don't really know where you're going and the wind is going to blow you in a direction that you don't necessarily want to go. Now on top of doing the research to figure out what career path I wanted to go down and all of that sort of thing I also did the research to figure out how long it was going to take me and what my options were. Now I personally chose pharmacy school right I wanted to become a pharmacist and most people don't really do the research and they just automatically assume that you get a bachelor's degree first that's a four-year degree sometimes it can even take longer if you take like really difficult majors and then you go to pharmacy school which is another four years most people just assume that it's going to be eight years. I did my research I looked ahead and I found out that not only can you graduate from undergraduate early you don't actually have to get a bachelor's degree in order to get into many different pharmacy schools but on top of that you can also graduate from pharmacy school early as well and that part I'm going to get to later and this isn't somebody who is like a genius or anything like that I was relatively average in undergrad maybe slightly above average I wasn't in some kind of gifted program or any weird stuff like that and I know of course that's another way to you know go about doing it and if you're gifted definitely go that route but you know I didn't have anything like that going for me. I literally just did the research that most people don't do I looked on internet forums for people who were pharmacists or who were currently becoming pharmacists and I asked them for their opinion on what I should do. I contacted people who were currently pharmacists as well and I asked them and I did all the research and reading I could online about everything to do with the subject of pharmacy. I also called different pharmacy schools just to confirm that they don't need a bachelor's degree you can just get a degree with what's known as the pre-pharmacy track. Now again this is a very specific example with pharmacy but this can be true for all kinds of different things and you're never going to know unless you actually research it. Now number three is very closely related to number two and that is I came up with a plan to finish undergraduate early. So this involved meeting with my guidance counselor and figuring out you know which classes I have to take first and in what order which classes were offered during spring semester fall semester summer semester etc and I came up with a plan to do the pre-pharmacy track and take all those classes and finish college early. Now my plan was actually two years and I kind of messed up and I it was totally my fault but I was a very difficult professor that I was taking and I honestly probably should have just stayed in the class but I decided to drop it before my grade got hit really badly and I ended up just because of that one class taking three years instead of two. Very very frustrating I could have actually graduated in four years and nine months instead of five years and nine months. So I made a plan but my plan wasn't quite good enough and I guess you could say the execution of the plan wasn't perfect either but I'm really not too mad about it to be honest during that third year I kind of just took it easy and I worked a lot and I earned a lot of money so it really wasn't a waste of time I also kind of just enjoyed my college experience that's important as well. Now number four on the list this is something that I did but I should have done it a lot more and that is use CLEP to test out of classes. This is the college level examination program or CLEP this is how you can test out of a bunch of different classes very similar to AP and IB in terms of the tests that you have to take at the end the only difference is with an AP test for instance a lot of the time you're going to have to score at least three out of five some colleges will require you to score four out of five and rarely they will even require you to score five out of five which is very difficult to do. With the CLEP exams you only have to score a 50% and on top of that you don't have to take a class for the entire semester in order to take the AP exam like you have to do with AP and IB so they are super convenient super easy to take not very difficult to score 50% on I wish I would have found out about these earlier so yeah CLEP exams fantastic way of testing out of classes that are just going to be in your way if I did more CLEP I likely would have been able to finish in two years instead of three so yeah highly highly recommended. Number five on the list I took extra classes during the semester now usually to graduate with a four-year degree they assume that you are going to be taking about 15 credits per semester and you're going to be skipping a summer now a lot of people out there are taking trimester systems and different block systems but I mean overall it's the same general concept during the semester you know 15 credits if you take one extra class per semester if you take 18 credits right you are going to over you know five six semesters eliminate an entire semester's worth of classes if you take two extra classes you can eliminate two extra semesters worth of classes. Now taking 21 credits is very very difficult I think the highest amount of credits I took was 20 and then I was doing this like running class and I decided to drop out of that because I had to wake up really early in the morning so I ended up being 19 and 19 credits was pretty tough especially with all the science and math classes I was taking so you know if you can do it you can do it but that is kind of tough but I never actually took any summer credits right so if I decided to go to school during the summer I could have done maybe three to five credits then and that also would have knocked off a lot of time as well so I did take extra classes during the semester but I never took summer classes and then number six I attended an accelerated program during graduate school now again this is one of those things a lot of people don't do the research and they don't even know that accelerated programs that are legit exist so usually if you go to pharmacy school it's going to be about four years for you to be able to get your doctorate this program was two years and nine months now it was very difficult right graduate schools hard enough as it is and then if it's an accelerated program that means all of that same stuff that everybody else has to know is crammed into two years and nine months instead of four so very very difficult but to me it was absolutely worth it being able to save an extra one year and three months of my life was totally worth it because during that one year and three months I was getting entry-level work experience I was establishing myself and I was learning a lot via on the job training and again this is one of those things so many people watching this video right now are going to be like oh well you know you were able to do that but that's just because it's in health right there's only accelerated programs in health you're so so wrong the only thing is you just haven't done the research now you have to be careful because there are accelerated programs out there that are from scammy universities that aren't legit so you have to make sure that the university is properly accredited so you want to make sure to be thorough with your research but this can be a fantastic option for the right person that's all I have for you guys hope you enjoyed the video hope it gave you some ideas check out my other videos right here I made them just for you go ahead gently tap the like button hit that subscribe button ring the notification bell and comment down below any thoughts comments criticisms etc that you have on the video and I will see you next time