I am a freshman scheduling sophomore classes.
Here is what I think I’ll take for 10th grade:
AP Statistics
AP Calc AB
AP Human Geography
Honors Biology
Honors English 10
Honors Spanish 3
Theology (required, Catholic school)
Wellness (required, but will try to appeal to get an elective)
I am aiming for some of the top schools in the nation, does this give me a good track?
Also, any advice?
No, it doesn’t, especially if you drop wellness.
Drop AP stats, keep wellness to have a break because this is already a very hard schedule. Replace AP stats with an elective in a subject of interest.
What math classes will you take junior and senior year?
If you’re taking biology this year, what science did you take last year? You need to make sure you have one each of bio, chem, and physics.
Ok, Stats is/was my elective and by taking it I would put myself in a position to take PSEO’s (College courses, in this case math) at the U of MN in 11th or 12th grade. My school only lets juniors and seniors take those, even though I meet the prerequisite.
As for the science, I am currently taking Physical science, and my science track is looking like 9) physical science 10) honors bio 11) AP Chem 12) AP physics.
Does physical science include chemistry? Because AP chem is the second level in the chem sequence. Talk to the teacher to make sure you don’t have to take honors chem first.
What other electives are you interested in? It seems like an awful lot of APs for a sophomore.
Colleges don’t expect more than a total of 6-8 APs/PSEO classes so there’s no need to pile up APs. However elite college will expect excellence in ECs (community impact for instance) which requires some free time we’ll used. Read &How to be a high school superstar_.
Are you sure you need AP stats to get into PSEO? I’d assume calculus would be sufficient. I’m guessing you’d take calculus 1&2 at UMN, Linear algebra, Discrete math for jr/Sr year?
Physical science is pretty much all chemistry. I enjoy business, and my school offers accounting to sophomores (1 semester), but I’ve heard a lot of people really enjoy BioMed, but also my high school has a world-renowned engineering class (very competitive with colleges like MIT in world competitions) that I would be interested in taking. I think my math capabilities would go well with engineering.
I’m glad you point out that I wouldn’t need to take AP Stats to get into PSEO; the more I think about it the less I want to take it.
I find myself in a dilemma where I have a pretty high capacity for school in general, especially math, but I struggle to find something that magnetizes my interest above all else. It’s not that I don’t find interest in business or engineering, but I find enormous interest in anything STEM/business, but I fear that I have to choose one or the other some day.
You don’t have to choose. You can get involved in FIRST Robotics and in DECA competitions. High school business classes are not like college business classes so I’d stay away from them. I don’t think you’d be allowed to take a Carlson class as PSEO but the CFANS intro class to agribusiness would be much more rigorous and closer to a Carlson level class.
You could also want to save statistics for PSEO, and take the mathy Carlson version (Calculus based) rather than the BA version (which AP Stats is the light version of, which explains why you generally need to take stats in college and consider AP stats as a preview.)
Try different clubs and competitions, see what interests you. If your goal is UMN or UWisconsin, ECs won’t matter much compared to your PSEO grades, but if you’re interested in, say, Northwestern or McKenna or Middlebury or Yale then ECs will matter tremendously.