Is my fall schedule too intense?

I’m wanting to take research methods, abnormal psychology, biopsych, behavioral neuroscience, general chemistry. I’ll be applying to most schools as a neuroscience major and psych minor, but for schools that want you take your sciences in community college, I’ll apply as a psych major and neuro minor, because I’ll only have taken chem and bio psych (as opposed to a year of biology, a year of chem, a semester of physics, semester of calculus, etc).

I’ll also be playing baseball (off season training but still about about a 20+ hour commitment/wk) and working about 20 hours… I really want to take as much as possible this fall though because I’m applying next spring, and I’m still trying to create a trend in my transcript after a slow start. But I did pull a 4.0 in 3 condensed classes this summer (stats, English and astronomy).

It sounds like a lot. But you’ll have a few weeks to drop with no “W” and a full refund. So your best bet may be to attend all of the classes at first. If the load really looks manageable, fine; but if not, you can make an informed decision about which class to drop after seeing all the syllabi and experiencing the way the instructors teach. Out of five academic classes, there’s pretty likely to be one that jumps out at you as an experience you’d rather miss - at this point, you might as well wait and see, as try to make a blind guess about which one to drop.

Sounds like a recipe for earning mediocre grades to me (5 demanding courses + half-time job + sports commitment). I’d drop a class now. You may be in a hurry, but I think that you would be better off to take fewer courses so that you will be more likely to maintain your GPA.