Hi I’m starting uoftSG as a humanities student, however I love biology and i might want to major in that as well. I took chem/bio in high school but when I checked the prerequisite for chemistry on the uoft site it said I needed functions & calculus as well??? When I took chem in high school I never felt that I needed math. Is there any way around this???
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hey there,
speaking as a former life-sci student turned liberal arts bum, math really can be important for bio. if you really want to skip the math, you can, but it’s tricky.
you don’t need to take calculus in first year as a biology major, but MAT135/6 are recommended corequisites for CHEM138/9, which are required. so, you don’t HAVE to take the maths, but they’re recommended for a reason.
secondly, there’re these things at uoft called enrolment controls. enrolment controls are basically a horrible horrible thing that make it a lot more difficult for you to get into that cool course you found randomly one lazy Sunday on the course calendar.
if you take a look at the enrolment controls for BIO130H1, BIO120H1, CHM138H1, and CHM139H1, you’ll see that they all have ‘P’ enrolment controls. that means that certain students get to enrol before everyone else, leaving the rest of you poor souls?to scrounge for spots?on August 9th. lucky for you, these first year bio and chem classes are ENORMOUS, so you’ll probably get into them, but it’s not guaranteed.
there are a lot of pesky obstacles here, and probably more i haven’t thought of. that’s why you should probably discuss all this with your college registrar’s office once you get on campus. you guys can chat and figure out whether the major is for you, if you can go it without the math, or if you should spend some time catching up, either in night/summer school or in uoft’s PUMP program.
anyway, take the first-year bio and chem classes – after a year of slogging through lectures, labs and exams, you’ll know what you want to do.
cheers,
aska