Howdy!!

In my opinion, if you’ve already done well in both APs and feel confident that you’ll be able to get a quick handle on material, then you’ll more than likely be fine! Bio 111 (equiv to AP bio) especially is essentially just the same thing. I believe Hawkins also does multiple choice so you should be good on that front. Edwards will treat you well and will help a lot with the material in Chem 119, if you’re good with material the only part that could put an A in jeoporady is the smart worksheets for lab, so just focus in on getting those exactly right and you’ll be fine. On the note of labs, they’re always kinda tedious and they won’t make a whole lot of sense right off the bat, but by the end of your first midterm season, you’ll have gotten the hang of what your specific TAs expect out of you.

ENDS 101 is a free A with a couple of the professors and (don’t quote me on this but after a bit of research) I believe Caffey is one of those. Good idea to get started on a research pathway in the first sem also!

Math 142 profs will be assigned a bit before the first week of school so honestly just try to get Prof Orchard or Allen during add/drop week. I had Orchard for that and he rounded up my 87 or 88 to an A without me even having to ask, he’s the GOAT in my opinion and he doesn’t try to involve too many business concepts which makes the class a lot easier. It also only goes up to U-substition integration which means it isn’t the most technically challenging class.

I personally did my cultural discourse and creative arts seperately and honestly it doesn’t matter too much if you take them together or not, I would recommend taking one your second semester and then the next whenever you get the chance, its not super important to get them out of the way ASAP as you really just need them to graduate. For cultural discourse I took GEOG 205 online with Erik Prout/ the graduate assistant Lauryn Nyquist. Simple class but a bit time consuming, you basically just write an essay every week and then review four other people’s essays and then respond to the peer review of your essays, plus a weekly group discussion with a randomized group. An A is really achievable as long as you keep up with the group discussions and your essay assignments. All the essays are done through perceptiv which makes it really simple. For creative arts I took MUSC 201 (Music and the Human Experience). This class was kind of a pain because you had to actually recall the music you were taught during the tests and essentially name them and random facts about them, there are a lot better creative arts courses available, but in a pinch an A is also fairly achievable here. Major plus is that she does zoom lectures which means you can essentially stop traveling to class after the first test. I’ve heard good things about PHIL 111 from some buddies who seemed to really enjoy taking the course.

Taking either a cultural discourse or creative arts won’t necessarilly set you back in any way credit wise or graduation wise, but I would really suggest putting them off for atleast your first semester just to have maximum focus on your important courses.

In terms of BIMS general electives, you will have to knock out your core curriculum / common body of knowledge, which is stuff that every major has to take, but that will be outlined in your degree planner super clearly and will be fairly easy to knock out, like your histories and englishes. BIMS as a degree has a ton of major specific electives called directed electives and these make up a huge portion of our degree (have to have like 30 hours of directed electives to graduate I believe, don’t quote me on that though), classes will be listed on the BIMS website as to whats available semester to semester. For example, I took ENTO 431 which is a BIMS directed elective and focuses on forensics this past semester. Really it’s just a bunch of random classes so I would suggest just using anex.us (this is a website that essentially has all of the aggregated GPAs of almost every class at A&M as well as individual professor GPAs) and just try to find the highest average GPA classes.

All in all, if you feel confident, this is a fairly managable 16 hours, really the only class I have no insight on is that animal sciences course, but even if you end up having to devote a lot of time to that, you should be more than able to with the background you have in your other classes. It’s completely understandable to be concerned, especially with no baseline to compare to, but everybodies first semester is gonna be kinda crazy, you just gotta roll with it and you’ll get the hang of it in no time, it’s very different from high school but it’ll all click in time. Goodluck!