Is graduating in 3 years a good idea?
To preface, I am an incoming High School student entering UCLA and planning to major in Electrical Engineering. I think it's important to mention that I likely made it into such a prestigious school off luck (I only had one extracurricular, for example), and even though I had straight A's in high school, I know that classes are much, much more difficult at University, especially at a tough institution such as UCLA.
However, my school has a dual enrollment program in which we we were able to earn an AA in French (useless, I know), but this will allow me to clear pretty much every GE I have to do. Furthermore, I took it upon myself to take classes online at a CC and will have completed Calc I, II, linear algebra (currently taking), and I plan on doing Calc III and differential equations during this summer. This will completely eliminate my math prerequisites at UCLA.
Thus, I will only have to take 12-14 units per quarter for 3 years. This means I will have to take about 3 classes per quarter, or 3 classes + 1 Lab. HOWEVER, the concerning thing is that these 3 classes are core classes. An example of a quarter schedule would be: CS-32 , Physics 1B, Physics 1AL (lab), EC Engr 3 (EE class). Sometimes my schedule is 3 EE-related classes.
To those who have gone to "hard" institutions, is this type of schedule manageable? (Not saying that a regular university isn't hard, but because I am graded on a curve, I am competing against very high-achievers, which is what makes things hard)