I want to major in Healthcare Administration in college but I also want a leg up while also still in high school (I m now in my senior year). I’m questioning which AP classes to take to be able to do so. I’ve already determined AP Biology but I was thinking about AP Chemistry or AP Physics 1 (the internet strongly advises taking all three). Please answer what AP classes you think I should take (you could add ones I didn’t have up).
- I’m also taking AP Psychology (it’s one of the easiest AP class),
AP Language, and Intro to Medical Terminology (elective).
- Junior year, I took AP Environmental Science and that class was such a joke. Long story short, it sucked.
- For anyone taking AP Bio, AP Chem, AP Phy 1, can you list the average amount of time you would spend doing homework?
Well, with a healthcare administration degree you do not have to go to medical school. Is going to medical school your plan? If you are going to be a senior in high school, you typically do not want a hard schedule.
Can you give us a list of science classes you’ve taken? AP Biology, AP Chemistry, and AP Physics are all time-consuming classes. I would not recommend taking all of those, alongside another class and two other APs. Also, which math classes have you taken? Which colleges are you interested in?
I would think AP Statistics would be very important to healthcare administration. it’s also very useful for med school. Obviously, also AP Calculus. Also, AP Macro and Micro Economics.
Out of curiosity, I took at look at a sample undergrad course sequence for Healthcare Admin. Unless you plan to combine with a premed major of some sort…the only hard science you need to prepare for is Anatomy and Physiology.
If you’re JUST interested in administration…you need analytics, economics, communication, statistics, etc. A solid general chemistry class will help you get through Physiology. Definitely take AP Biology. AP Physics and AP Chem would be helpful for a pre-med student, but not just administration.
Can you give us more info how how you’re approaching this? Do you want a medical career AS WELL as an administration degree? If not…you probably don’t need to kill yourself with AP science.
Honestly, I’d say you should take as many as you can handle with your skill level in the subjects. I don’t know anything about healthcare administration, but I do know about these classes. Last year I took AP Chem and AP Bio along with APUSH and AP Lang. I didn’t have too much of a problem balancing everything, but your workload has more to do with your teacher than the class.
My AP Bio teacher had a reputation for over-preparing her students. Five out of eighteen of us made fives despite having had an inept PAP Bio teacher. We did a ton of reading, and it was very boring, time consuming reading from the textbook. The labs were really fun; they were the best part of the class. I probably had somewhere between five and ten hours of homework a week, but I procrastinated, so I’d do it all in one night before it was due.
My AP Chem teacher was fairly new to teaching. He would assign a few problems every night. They weren’t very time consuming if you knew how to do them, but if you were confused (as many people always were), there was never an opportunity for you to get help. I never really did my homework in this class because I knew how to do it, and I was lazy, but it usually would have taken between thirty minutes and two hours if you were hopeless at it. Only one person out of around fifty or sixty made a five, however our test was delayed by sixteen days, so that could have negatively affected our scores.
Even though I felt like I was great at chemistry and awful at biology, I thought the AP Bio test was easier. I struggled to do good on biology tests all year, but I made a five on the AP test. I scored the highest in my region on the local Chemistry Olympiad, but I only made a four on the AP test.
The good news is you might have a little bit of background knowledge from taking APES. I made a four on that AP test without studying simply from the overlap with biology and chemistry.
I’m taking AP Physics now, and we have one homework assignment due every other day. We have somewhere between twenty and thirty problems per assignment, and they can take me anywhere from two to maybe five hours if it’s new and difficult. I really like it, but I have a great, experienced teacher, and I’m familiar with how his class works because I’ve had him before.
Someone else mentioned AP Calculus. I’m taking it now, and it’s my favorite class, but again that’s probably just because I have a great teacher. It has the same format (and the same teacher) as my physics class except the homework is less time consuming. It takes me maybe one to three hours to do one assignment.
It’s definitely possible to take all three of the science classes at once. One of my friends did it last year, and they had all As while taking other AP classes as well.
Since all of this is specific to my personal experience, you should probably talk to students who’ve already taken these classes at your school and see what they thought about them. Ask them if the class prepared them for the test and how much homework the teacher assigned.
I wouldn’t know about any of the other classes because my school doesn’t offer them, but if you’re just looking for a head start, you may be able to take classes at a local community college. You’d have to make sure your college of choice would accept the credits, and you’d have to pay for the class. (Mine was four hundred.) You should talk to your guidance counselor if you’re interested.
Sorry for writing so much. I got a little carried away.