Hi! I’m really sorry in advance if I made any mistakes in creating this discussion or forum topic or anything, I’m new to this site.
Anyways, I am a current junior in Bay Area, CA selecting classes for senior year. I am primarily interested in Computer Science or Informatics related majors at mid-tier UC’s, Cal Poly, some state universities. I only recently decided I wanted to go into this field so I haven’t done too much throughout high school to prepare for it, although I have been in coding clubs and have taken classes to learn programming.
I haven’t taken AP Computer Sciences because my school department is not great, with poor teachers and not a lot of funding. I am only in Algebra 2/Trig for math and will definitely be taking Precalculus next year.
So for senior year I have a bunch of graduation requirements left to fulfill and here are the 5/6 classes I definitely will/have to take: AP Physics 1 (science req), AP Gov/Econ (History req), English 12 (english req), some fine art elective since it’s required, Precalculus. My dilemma comes with my 6th class, as I am debating between taking AP Statistics or AP Computer Science A, and I can’t take both.
I would like to take stats because I want to take as high as a math class I could since I can’t take calculus (long story), and I am interested in Data Science as a future pathway, so I want to at least get introduced to stats. But I also want to take AP CSA, because I am interested in majoring in CS (but as I previously mentioned, my school’s department sucks). But I don’t know which would be better to take as a class. I am definitely self-studying the other one, whichever I don’t take in class, and I feel like either class will be reasonable and interesting to self study OR take in class.
I’ve been asking around as to which would be better to take in class and which to self study, and honestly I’ve been getting mixed reviews. I don’t know too much about which colleges would prefer or whether not taking one would affect my chances of getting into college. Which one would you all recommend to take, and which one should I self study?
Thanks for taking time to read all of this! Looking forward to reading your responses.
-S