So, I’m beginning to start my Freshman year in high school in a few weeks, but I’m a little worried about this classes I signed up for. My current selections are:
Spanish Honors II
Geometry (Honors)
Biology (Honors)
Art II (Honors)
World History & Geography
9th Grade English (Honors)
Is it smart to take all of those my first year.?My entire junior highschool experience I made straight A’s while taking every honors class they offered. It did take quite a bit of work with they’re being 3, but 5 honors sounds like a lot. Our school doesn’t offer highschool AP in any courses, so it’s honors or standard. Are there any extra science classes you might want to take, too? I’ve always wanted to go to Stanford & major in medicine & I know your GPA has to be extremely high to get in. But is it worth possibly screwing up your GPA just to take the harder classes? I’m so torn. Please help!
This depends on the difficulty of these classes. I just finished freshman year, taking all honors classes (with the exception of one elective) and I thought the workload was easy to handle, except for the few times when I had huge projects/essays due in multiple classes. My junior high school didn’t have honors classes, so it was just grades and teacher recommendation that got you into honors as a freshman.
However, my high school does have a good selection of AP courses, and you usually have to take honors classes to move up to AP later in high school, so this kind of decision might be different for us. If your choice is between honors and standard, but you feel like honors is too much right now, is it possible to move up to honors as a sophomore after taking a few standard classes as a freshman? What would your options be later on? Do you know how hard the honors classes are as opposed to their regular counterparts, and how much of a difference there is in workload and curriculum?
About this extra science class-- are freshmen allowed to double up on science classes? If so, what other courses are available? What’s the normal science sequence for your school?
If you think your GPA will suffer because of your schedule, it might be worth dropping a few honors classes. However, the only thing that matters is if you feel confident about your schedule. If you think you really can’t do it, then do what you feel is best, but don’t underestimate yourself either.
I think you’d be fine. That’s pretty much standard for high achieving students.
Just a note, you don’t major in medicine (or pre-med for that matter) because medicine is a terminal professional degree, meaning you need more than just a bachelor’s. You go to an undergraduate college or university and major in whatever you like (can be anything, including english, music, CS, etc). You will also have to complete the med school prerequisite course work during your undergrad years, which includes a lot of science classes. You will need to take the MCAT exam and score high on that and have a high college GPA to gain admission into a med school. Med school is difficult to get into, but it is completely based on your undergraduate work.