Hi! I’m an rising senior and its registration week for next year’s classes. I plan on becoming a Pediatric Dentist and want to go to University of South Carolina - Columbia. The classes I have picked so far is:
AP Lit.
Honors Econ (1 semester)
Honors Genetics/Honors Anatomy and Physiology (each 1 semester)
Entrepreneurship 2 (Business class)
Virtual Enterprise (Business class but 2 class periods)
But my problem is that I do not know if for my 7th class whether to take AP Gov. or Teacher Cadet which is dual credit (a class about teaching and the education system.). Both are supposedly easy classes taught by awesome teachers and are year long. Also I have never taken an AP class before and I am not sure if this will be too much for my senior year.
Unless you plan to become a teacher, I don’t think that Teacher Cadet will be more helpful to you than an AP class. It’s important to take as many AP classes as you can manage (don’t sacrifice your GPA for AP!) in order to make yourself a competitive applicant for college. Another option, if you don’t want to take an AP class, is to take a class geared to your intended career (“Pediatric Dentist”). Are there any health or medical courses at your school? You seem to be taking a lot of Business classes. Why not try out something more fitting to your career?
no math = unless you’ve already completed calculus bc, you need to take pre-calculus honors or calculus. If you have, you have more leeway but remember that you’ll have a math placement test that will determine how many math classes you need to take. You want to place the highest possible and start in college calc1.
-only one semester of social science = find another one; AP gov or honors gov?
Those would be huge problems for usc admissions.
Another issue is related to your future major : have you taken AP physics 1? Or honors physics? You need each of biology, chemistry, and physics, plus preferably one AP science (AP chemistry or AP biology) but since you’ve never taken an AP class and those are really hard they probably wouldn’t be a good pick. However it means your first semester of college will be extremely difficult because you’ll compete against students who’ve taken those AP 's. Remember to register for your math class, freshman English, chemistry, sociology or psychology OR world language 2, and that’s it, in order to ease the transition. It’ll be 14 credits and it’ll be plenty. Add biology 1 second semester, continue with math, chemistry (and world language, or start our sequence). It’s not a dash, it’s a marathon. Daily training and pacing yourself make all the difference.
In addition, you’ll have a college graduation requirement in a world language and the higher you’ve gone in highschool, the fewer classes you’ll need to take in college.
Have you reached level 3 in a foreign language?
There periods of business classes, which are considered non academic, would also make you less competitive for admission. I’d recommend you only take one and use the remaining periods for academic courses.
You’re better off taking Precalculus during the year, when you have more time to process it. For your possible future majors, a THOROUGH understanding of precalculus is necessary, because you’ll have to take Calculus alongside students who’ve taken it before AND rank in the top 20% against them.
An alternative is if you can take precalculus honors over the summer and AP Calculus AB during the year, which would position you best for what you intend to study in college.
What would your major be? Biochemistry? Human Health Science?
Virtual Enterprise sounds fun but 3 periods of fun classes senior year is 2 too many. So, take EITHER Virtual Enterprise OR Entrepreneurship2, but not both.
Latin 3 = the issue is that you won’t be able to use that language so you’ll likely need to take a (spoken) foreign language in college. Fortunately Spanish is derived from Latin and is easier so it should be okay.
So, first semester you’d have:
Chemistry 1+lab, Freshman English, Spanish 1, Calculus
and semester 2 you’d have
Chemistry 2+lab, Spanish 2, Statistics (or Calculus if you didn’t place into Calculus your first semester, or Calculus2 if required by your major), Biology 1+ lab.
That would cover a variety of majors.
You’d still need to take pre-calculus during the year in order to have a thorough quantitative background since you’ll have calculus first semester for a business major.
Taking lots of business classes in highschool may help you decide if you like the subject, but it’s only distantly related to what you’ll do in college, just like middle school science is related but very different from high school physics. It does not replace core courses.
Okay I think what I might do is apply for USC as a business major. And if I decide to change my major I can always change it. The classes I might take will be:
AP Lit
AP Gov
Honors Econ
Honors anatomy/Honors Genetics
Virtual Enterprise
Calculus
Then I will take pre-cal this summer. How does this sound?
