Hi, I’ve just recently graduated from high school and was accepted into UCD as a biochemistry major! I’m debating on whether to take CHE2A with STAT100 or BIS2A. I personally prefer taking CHE2A and BIS2A together but not sure if it would be too hard since I really don’t want to kill my GPA the moment I start college haha! Pretty conflicted on what I should do tbh cry Any opinions or advices will be very much appreciated, thank you!!
I wouldn’t have both CHE 2A and BIS 2A first quarter. Most people seem to start BIS 2A winter quarter freshman year if they need it. Now that I think about it, two of my close biosci friends (one was NPB and one was biochem) didn’t take the BIS 2 series until winter quarter, and they both graduated within four years just fine. The one in NPB even graduated a year early!
If you do decide to do both, definitely don’t do STA 100 on top of that. Instead, pick a GE or two (depending on the credit amount) that bring you to around 15 units and stick with that.
You shouldn’t be taking STA 100 as a freshman anyway; at the very least, don’t take it your first quarter. Most biosci people I knew took it sophomore or junior year. Heck, I was in computer science and didn’t take my required stats class until junior year.
Thank you so much for all your advice! I mostly just wanted to get these required classes over with and was hoping that maybe my past classes of AP Bio and AP Chem in hs would help, but gah if it kills my GPA, it’s not worth it haha I’m just so scared to not be able to graduate on time aaah! Again, thank you so much!
Your past classes would most likely help, assuming you retained information from them. Even if you didn’t, you’d be seeing a lot of the material a second time and it might stick the second time around. But the thing to realize is that a year-long AP class is being condensed into a 10 week college class in both of these cases. It’s less that the material is difficult in and of itself and more that most of the people taking these courses (i.e. freshmen) aren’t expecting the very fast pace; they figure that they did well enough in high school, not taking into account that all this information is crammed into a much shorter timeframe now. You need time to adjust to the pace and to college life in general. There’s plenty of time to stack up on intensive classes in later quarters, trust me!
The CHE 2 series is the more important one to start for timing reasons. Each class of the CHE 2 series is offered two quarters each year: 2A in fall and winter, 2B in winter and spring, and 2C in spring and fall. In contrast, each of the BIS 2 series is offered all quarters. There’s more flexibility with starting the BIS 2 series because of that. With CHE 2, you can get behind very quickly if you put it off simply because you only have two chances to take it each year instead of three.