I am struggling in pre calc this year. I am a junior and this class is usually meant for seniors. I don’t want the low grade to bring down my gpa. Should I drop the class and take Ap Stats? Will not having pre calc on my transcript ruin my chances? Will not having a math my senior year also look bad? I want to major in Child Life and Animal sciences so is math even important for my future.
It depends on where you want to go to school. If you applying to your state school, go look up what classes you need for your major. For Child Life, you may be able to simply take something like College Algebra or Trigonometry (in college) to fulfill your math requirement. For Animal Science, I’m guessing it’s Calculus (BUT that is school dependent). If you don’t take Pre-Calc now, you’ll need to take it in college. It’s not the end of the world, but it might be something you want to take the summer before (at a CC) so you aren’t ‘behind’ the standard student.
If on the other hand, you want to go to a more competitive college, you might call and speak to a college advisor about their expectations of incoming students and/or competitive applicants.
Check the school’s you are applying to for their requirements. My son did go through AB Calculus in high school but really didn’t need to. He was an animal science major and in college only needed College Algebra or Statistics. (He graduated with a 4.0 and is now a veterinarian so I don’t think it hurt him at all that he hated calculus). Statistics was of much more value to him (and he never took it so had to learn it on his own). BUT again as said above it is very dependent on the school and their program.
If you want to go to the main campus of Penn State, it would help you to have completed pre-calc. But you can start the animal science major at any campus.
There’s a lot of science in the animal science major - statistics would probably be more helpful, in order to understand the stats involved with animal studies.
If you like, drop precalc and take AP Stats this year, and do precalc as a senior. I wouldn’t recommend this, but since I see no requirement for calc for the animal sciences major, just 6 credits in “quantification” which I presume is fancy talk for 6 credits of gen ed math, and if you’re okay with starting at a branch campus, I think it’s okay.
If you really want to start at State College campus, then I’d get a ton of tutoring and try to power through the pre-calc.
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