General Biology vs. Botany/Plant Science

<p>I enjoy working with plants, and I think I would find a job with them enjoyable. I am, however, only a junior in High school. I'm trying to find colleges, and I'm wondering if I should focus on schools with Botany majors, or instead look into a general Bio major. I'm hoping to go to grad school, and future salary doesn't matter to me. I'm just curious about the advantages and disadvantages of biology and botany majors when compared.</p>

<p>I’m not an expert on the subject but if you plan to go to grad school anyway, my personal opinion would be to go for Biology, then go to grad school for the more concentrated field of Botany. </p>

<p>This way you will have an excellent and well-rounded base to work with, and it will also give you more options to fall back on if you change your mind or can’t find work.</p>

<p>Hey, I’m a senior who just went through the college application process, and I’m also really interested in plant biology, so hopefully I might have something useful to say about this subject.</p>

<p>From what I’ve seen, a lot of colleges with strong biology programs (e.g. Cornell) will have a plant biology “concentration” (among other concentrations) included in the Biology major. All Biology majors have to take a certain amount of advanced biology classes beyond the required intro classes, so when you concentrate in a certain subfield of biology, your advanced classes focus on that subfield.</p>

<p>Plants are included in the other subfields of biology as well. For instance, lots of research in cellular/molecular biology and evolutionary biology focuses on plants. As a result, I’d agree with the previous poster: you should look at schools that have strong Biology programs.</p>