And you definitely can start taking upper level chemical engineering classes. It's very common in college to ask to pass out of a requirement by taking the final. I passed out of the required intro computer science course in college (and not with AP Computer Science), for example.
Pretty much everyone thinks this board is weird. There have been multiple articles written on how odd it is, and most companies tend to have multiple domain experts on the board. You won't find many companies outside of the defense industry with 7/11 board members who are retired political and military leaders.
For an example of a normal board of directors just look at a competing company's board--quest diagnostics--and notice the number of MDs, PhDs, financial experts, and CEOs of other companies, and the lack of former cabinet secretaries, senators, and retired generals. http://ir.questdiagnostics.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=82068&p=irol-...
>And you definitely can start taking upper level chemical engineering classes.
You can't walk into Stanford and start taking junior and senior level chemical engineering classes as a freshmen, you would have a complete lack of prerequisite knowledge.
>It's very common in college to ask to pass out of a requirement by taking the final.
It is not very common, in fact it's pretty rare these days to find a department that will allow this.
Even if they did allow this, there are stacks of prerequisite chemistry, math, physics, and general engineering classes before a student can even touch classes in the chemical engineering department (other than special classes like freshmen seminars).
It is totally common to skip prereqs. When I say common, I don't mean everyone does it. I mean every year a handful of students do it. In fact, it's probably more common at the top science/engineering colleges (MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley, etc.). I mean, every year these schools have a couple of geniuses that won gold medals at the IChO/IMO/IOI/other olympiads, have been taking college (not community college) courses while in high school, and/or did legitimate research while in high school (and I'm not talking about the "research" volunteerships that many high schoolers try to get), etc.
I went to Berkeley, and the EECS department let you skip any prereq by taking the final.
There's not a single person on the board who is an expert in anything close to their core technology. I can understand wanting some politically influential people, but only politically influential people. How is that not weird?
> You don't know what her coursework was a Stanford. She may well have skipped the intro classes.
I'm fairly certain Stanford some curriculum requirements. Even if they didn't, no matter how smart you are, you can't just hop in and start taking upper level Chemical Engineering classes because you took AP Chem in high school. There's too much prerequisite knowledge that you just won't have.