For one semester, ahead of the class

“I spent the spring term of my sophomore year working as an editorial intern and web intern at Newsweek magazine,” Aku Ammah-Tagoe ’11 said in an email. “I wrote stories for the magazine and the website, contributed to research and multimedia projects and helped run the magazine’s Twitter feed and Tumblr blog.”

“Combined with living in Manhattan for a semester, it was an unbeatable learning experience,” Ammah-Tagoe said.

Advanced standing, available to underclassmen who enter the University with sufficient credit earned from Advanced Placement or other exams, allows students to take a semester’s leave of absence from the University and still graduate with their class. Alternatively, students can advance an entire class year and graduate early.

While many eligible students decline the advanced standing option, citing the desire to take classes and remain connected to the Princeton experience, the program allows students to take advantage of opportunities that would not have been possible on campus.

Laura Du ’14, who is currently working in Washington, D.C., as an intern at the Council of Economic Advisers, said advanced standing allowed her to pursue a valuable opportunity.

“I’m applying to be a Woodrow Wilson major at the moment, and I’d be interested in concentrating in economics and public policy, so being able to take the time off, experience the public sector and work so closely with politics is really helpful,” Du said.

To take advantage of the advanced standing option, however, Du had to leave behind her extracurricular activities and friends. Du also missed the traditional period for joining eating clubs; she said she would likely bicker or sign in to a club upon returning to the University in the fall but hasn’t given it much thought yet.

While Du is far from alone in Washington — she shares an apartment with fellow CEA intern and advanced standing student Sonya Huang ’14 — only one to six students out of the approximately 300 eligible have taken advanced-standing semesters in each of the last five years, according to University Spokesperson Martin Mbugua.

“Very few” students use an entire year of advanced standing, Mbugua said in an email.

Du and Ammah-Tagoe said they were drawn to advanced standing by the unusual opportunities their internships represented.

“I think that it’s obviously very hard for anyone to say ‘I want to leave Princeton and my friends,’ and so that was something that weighed against taking advanced standing for me,” Du said. “But when I got this internship in D.C. late in the fall, I just realized that ... this opportunity wasn’t probably something that I would come across very often again, so I decided to take advanced standing.”

Ammah-Tagoe had also secured her internship before deciding to take advanced standing.

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“I had been curious about advanced standing since my freshman year, when an acquaintance of mine, Laura Robertson ’10, took a semester off to work at Cookie magazine,” Ammah-Tagoe said in an email. “My journalism professor, Evan Thomas, offered me a spot at Newsweek halfway through the fall term of sophomore year.”

The University awards Advanced Placement credit for high scores on the College Board’s Advanced Placement exams, as well as the International Baccalaureate or British A-level exams, the SAT Subject Tests and departmental placement exams.

Students who take courses that are judged to be distinct from the courses for which they have received Advanced Placement credits and who meet certain other criteria can use one of the two advanced-standing options.

With four credits, a student qualifies for a semester’s leave of absence from the University, and students with eight units of credit can graduate in three years.

Du, who had International Baccalaureate credit in math, Chinese and economics upon entering the University, said the University advisers who helped her with the decision were helpful and understanding.

“They were pretty flexible,” Du said. “I didn’t speak to my dean about final plans until December. Ideally, you’re supposed to decide before then, but because [the internship] came up so late, that’s when I went to [the dean] with it.”

Ammah-Tagoe said that while residential college and departmental advisors were helpful, she still had to work out many details by herself.

“I was on my own when it came to making plans for the term, signing into a department, figuring out upperclass dining options and planning my return in the fall,” Ammah-Tagoe said.

Although advanced-standing students are still responsible for the courses required by their degree and department, Du said that the semester away wouldn’t have a significant impact on her future schedule.

“I’ll probably just have to focus a little more on my major instead of taking as many other classes as I want,” Du said. “From now on, I only need to take four courses a semester if I really only wanted to do that, having already done one semester of five courses.”

According to Du, advanced-standing students do not pay tuition during their time away from campus.

Despite the benefits of a semester without class or early graduation, most students forego the opportunity for advanced standing. Austin Gengos ’15, for example, had the option to take advanced standing but decided against it.

“At first graduating early seemed appealing,” he said. “I could save a sizeable amount of money that would otherwise be allocated to tuition, and I’d be working sooner.”

However, Gengos concluded that, in his case, advanced standing wouldn’t be worth it.

“After some reflection, I realized that advanced standing would exist in place of the opportunity to, in my case, take graduate courses in the finance department,” Gengos said, concluding that the opportunity to take these classes and his interest in the “social aspect of Princeton” outweighed the benefits of early graduation.