I’m currently a freshman in high school and we’re choosing our classes for sophomore year right now. I’m wondering which high school courses I should take if I’m looking to go into a medical microbiology career. We have a block schedule as well (ex: if we take Spanish 1 the first term, and then Spanish 2 the next, it’ll count as 2 years of Spanish).
You are over-analyzing this. There are no exotic HS course requirements.
just fulfill your grad requirements, take rigorous courses! take APs if you can, honors if you can’t. even if you take biology or chemistry or “related” courses, you’ll be forced to take them again in college. explore a variety of fields, don’t pigeon hole yourself to “medical” classes. maybe you’ll change your mind; you’re only a freshman! a lot of people go to high school with one passion, and come out with a totally different one.
First, you may not realize it, but you won’t be majoring in “premed”. You’ll choose whatever major you want - could be Music, Russian Literature, Anthropology, Philosophy, Statistics, Bioinformatics, it doesn’t matter. You’ll take a few intro to major classes in the sciences - intro to bio 1&2, intro to chem 1&2, organic chemistry, biochemistry, physics1&2 - plus general education classes - 2 semesters of COmposition/communication, sociology, psychology, foreign language*.
As should be obvious from the list of science courses, you want to be as strong in chemistry as possible, as well as biology and English. You’ll probably “preview” these classes in high school.
So, your schedule, over the course of Sophomore, Junior, and Senior year, should absolutely include:
4 years of English and Social Science/History; Math up to Calculus if possible; Foreign Language up to level 3 or 4; all three of Bio, chem, and physics + at least one of these at the AP level; some classes you find interesting personally.
- a foreign language spoken by people in the US, is helpful for med school - Brazilian Portuguese or Urdu, for instance.
Also when you say a medical microbiology career, do you mean an infectious disease doctor (a subspecialty of internal medicine), a clinical microbiologist (a subspecialty of clinical pathology), or a microbiology lab technician? Or maybe you even mean scientific research with a PhD in biology with a focus on human pathogens? Or maybe you mean an epidemiologist (PhD or MPH)?
Don’t actually answer that now. Your high school path is irrelevant for all of them as long as you do well and go to college. Just realize there’s a lot of ways to go within “medical microbiology.”
For Medical Microbiology, you would want some exposure to the following topics: Chemistry, Biology and Physics. Statistics and Calculus are helpful. As advised by other posters, just take the courses required for your HS and schools you plan to apply.
Not really. I had 10 AP exams going into college and did not retake any of those classes, almost all of which were STEM. This was an advantage since I was able to explore upper division studies in several different sciences during my four years in college.
Take all your basic sciences at as high a level as you can at your high school. If you have enough time in your schedule, try to take AP Spanish before you graduate and get a 5 on the exam. Work hard never settle for “good enough”, and have fun. Good luck 