Psychology

juillet
Wed, 17 Feb 2016 09:18:32 +0000

Are you planning on majoring in psychology and that’s why you’re asking?

Honestly, it kind of doesn’t matter what you take in high school with respect to specific majors. Even for a math/science major, you’d want to have taken calculus if possible but I’ve had some math major friends who started with calculus (I even have a friend who majored in math and started with pre-cal in college). For a social science major like psychology it matters even less. I majored in psychology and I took AP Calculus AB and AP Physics C in my senior year of high school.

If you are in Algebra II your next sequenced class should be a pre-calculus class. I actually would recommend the pre-calculus class over the statistics class. A pre-calculus class will cover sets, properties of functions, trigonometric functions, polynomial functions, exponential and logarithmic functions, matrices, and some basic properties of limits. Those are actually really important concept in statistics, and you need the foundational knowledge first before you go in. Any high-school level statistics class is not going to be that great in that regard. And if you ever want to take a more quantitative route in psychology, the pre-cal will give you the foundation to take calculus and mathematical statistics. You can take statistics in college.

As for the science - that’s completely up to you. I took calculus-based physics because I liked it, and I liked my teacher, and it was basically a double period of calculus the way my teacher taught it and I really loved calculus. But there are lots of sciences that are related to psychology and are just generally interesting to study. So pick based on your interests.