Hello, I’m a junior in high school who likes to challenge herself. I’m considering majoring in engineering in college and would like some help deciding my schedule next year. The AP classes that I have already taken include: AP US History, AP Microeconomics, AP Bio, and AP Language. I want my schedule to show that I challenge myself, but I don’t want to be extremely overwhelmed. I’ve received A’s in all my classes (except one B in AP Lang). Some of the colleges I’m considering include University of Michigan, Michigan State, University of Illinois-Urbana, Northwestern, Hope, University of Washington, and Michigan Tech.
CLASSES I’M DEFINITELY TAKING NEXT YEAR:
AP Chem
AP Spanish 5
Honors Physics
Study Hall
AP Macroeconomics
CLASSES I"M DECIDING BETWEEN:
AP Calc AB or AP Calc BC
statistics or accounting 1
Brit Lit or Lit, Culture, & Humanities or 2 semester English classes (they’re called theory of learning and film lit)
What do you know about the rigor and workload of the classes I’m deciding between and how colleges view them?
For an engineering major, I’d choose AP Calc BC, since it’s definitely really important to know all of those concepts, and Statistics, since it’s very important in science as a whole. However, I don’t know enough about your English choices to make a decision. Honestly, for those, I’d just choose what I found most interesting.
BC is two semesters of college calculus and AB is one semester–you typically cover all of the AB material twice as fast in BC as in AB. If you’re strong in math, definitely choose BC. BC can be difficult if you have a bad teacher, though, as the material can be hard to comprehend at first.
Calc BC if you’ve had an A in Precalc Honors, Calc AB if you haven’t.
Lit, culture, and Humanities, or the two semester classes (they sound like senior seminars and both are very interesting and college-like in focus.)
I would take
AP Calc BC
Honors Physics
AP Macro
AP chem
English: I would try to take some sort of Honors English or something that is not “regular” as you will go crazy. Any of those would probably be fine.
Statistics vs Accounting: Whatever interests you…with Calc BC and AP Chem and Honors Physics that is alot of STEM
Spanish: Are you interested in Spanish? Do you want to learn more? Does your colleges of interest have a foreign language requirement? If the answer is no, then you could always not ake that.