All of this self and career exploration and analysis will allow you to create an academic plan to achieve the educational credential(s) required for the career you plan to pursue. You will use this academic plan to map out your career path, at least while you’re in college. Your academic plan will list all of the classes you’re required to take to earn the credential you’re pursuing, whether you’re planning to earn a diploma, certificate or associate degree. In fact, if you're using financial aid, you are required to have an approved academic plan in Degree Works, HACC's degree auditing software. After earning your associate degree, you may plan to transfer to earn your bachelors degree, and some of you will continue for your masters and doctoral degrees.
Your academic plan will consist of pre-requisite courses, general education courses and major requirement courses. Prerequisites are courses required before taking other higher-level courses, and some examples may be developmental math, reading and writing plus 100-level introductory courses. Taking prerequisites first at the beginning of your academic plan will help you move forward evenly and strategically ensuring you have the basic knowledge upon which to build in your higher-level classes.
General education courses ensure you have a well-rounded education by learning about topics related and unrelated to your major. Examples of general education courses include first-year seminar, liberal arts, social sciences, physical sciences and physical education. General education courses provide the “soft skills” employers look for in addition to career-specific knowledge. Soft skills such as effective written and oral communication, critical thinking and information literacy (how to do effective research) often are viewed by employers as just as important as the career-specific knowledge required in an occupation.
Major requirement courses cover the specific content required for your career field such as business, psychology, human services, nursing and welding. These courses teach you the specific skills you will use in your day-to-day work. These courses often come in the second half of your academic plan although some majors may require introductory level major courses in your first or second semesters.
You do have some help creating your academic plan. Every HACC student has an assigned academic advisor who is charged with explaining your academic requirements and assisting you to make decisions about what classes to take when. Your academic advisor may be a professor in your intended field or a professional advisor in a centralized office. Consult with your academic advisor each semester to ensure you’re following the most effective course sequence and to ensure your major requirements haven’t changed. See the next section for details about how academic advising is structured at HACC.
As you and your advisor create your academic plan, in addition to choosing specific courses, remember to consider the modalities or how the courses are taught. Modalities were mentioned near the beginning of this text, and HACC uses the modalities of on campus, remote and virtual. On campus, of course, means you meet with your classmates and the instructor in a physical classroom on a HACC campus on specific days at certain times. Remote means the class is scheduled on specific days at certain times, but you meet on Zoom or other communication platforms. Virtual classes are completely asynchronous using Brightspace so you log in and work on the course on your own time with no instructor present in real-time. In addition, a class could be blended which may be a combination of any of those three modalities (e.g., on campus 50% of the time and virtual the other 50%).
Please use metacognition to consider how you learn best (also discussed in this text) and determine whether you benefit from being with an instructor in person or having an instructor via Zoom during class. You may feel comfortable or familiar with a subject so that learning independently online might work for you. Please keep in mind that virtual learning requires a lot of reading and viewing online materials since you wouldn’t be hearing an in-person lesson as you would on campus or in a remote class. Although virtual classes can be more convenient for your schedule, if you are concerned about your ability to succeed in a particular subject, you may wish to take an on campus or remote class to have real-time access to your instructor.
