High School Science Selection

 When it is time to select a new class for the upcoming school year, selecting a science can be a little tricky. What happens in different science classes is about as diverse and varied as any content area under the same umbrella. After all, in a regular freshman English class you’re reading text, discussing it, and writing a bit. The same is really true for an advanced-level senior English class, right?

However, the things a student is doing in an earth and space science class is completely different from what goes on in an anatomy class. Still, both classes are considered a science and in some places they might even be taught by the same person. There’s just a lot of variety within the curriculum of any school’s science department.

So, with such diversity how do you know which science course to take? To begin, it's obvious that students will need to take any specific science classes that are required of them. For example, in Florida where I counsel, students are required to have three science credits one of which must be biology. So, everyone takes biology, that’s a given, but those other two science credits are up in the air. Determining which ones to take can be easier for some students than for others. A student who is dead set on a career in medicine would do well to focus on courses like biology, chemistry, or anatomy. A future mechanical engineering student will likely benefit from physics.

What about the student who isn’t really going to touch science in the future though? How do they decide what science classes to take? My advice here is to just spend some time thinking about the curriculum offered and make a rational decision about which course has the most potential to be meaningful to you in the future, even if that means reaching for some connections,

For example, perhaps you have a budding writer on your hands. There’s generally not a ton of science involved in that. However, maybe a course like forensic science would be a good choice because there’s a lot of fodder there for storytelling. What about an artist? At some point they might want to draw a human figure, right? So maybe anatomy is a good choice. In fact, courses like anatomy or biology are always a good choice because a student is certainly always going to have a body and any knowledge that might come into play when they are sitting in a doctor’s office one day either to discuss themselves or a family member can be beneficial.

Making a decision about which science course to take can be a little challenging for a student without strong science inclinations. However, science is all around us in our everyday lives so making meaningful connections can be done by anyone. Sometimes, it just takes a little thinking.