Everyone knows that choosing subjects to study in the final years at high school is very important. For a start, you really need to make sure you can get the right grades so that top universities will want to offer you places. Secondly, you also want to do interesting subjects. Furthermore, what you do in your final years at school serves as a trial period for your future studies: you would want to choose a subject that allows you to explore what you may want to do at university level. However, the abundance of choices makes the whole process a very daunting prospect. So, here are some reasons why studying Economics at high school may be a good idea for those of you who have not yet decided on what to choose.
The right combination of science and art
Many people think they can do only either science or art. Yet, university prospectuses seem to indicate that successful candidates in most courses will have a mixture of both. Economics provides you with the right combination of essays and analytical maths that will help you study any course at university.
You will get the grades if you work hard
The kind of economics taught at school is fairly simple. Most courses will not require you to build models or find difficult partial derivatives. Instead, you will spend lots of time learning the intuition behind important concepts, such as supply and demand, inflation, economic growth, etc. Thus, you will actually write quite a lot of essays about these topics. As the course goes on, you will be able to pick and specialise in more interesting areas, such as game theory, labour and sport economics. Most courses allow you to develop a more practical approach towards economics. It is understandable since one needs to see how the theory relates to the real world before going on to do the subject in greater depth. This is arguably the most exciting bit about economics at school. You will have to do some maths, but it does not extend beyond simple statistics and arithmetic. Economics at school certainly does not require you to be a genius in order to do it. Therefore, you should get good grades by putting in lots of hard work and following the syllabus.
Economics relates to everything
You do not neccessarily have to choose economics just because you want to do it at university (in fact, it is often the other way around). Economics is still a useful subject to do even if you end up choosing Politics, Philosophy, Sociology, Law or History. This is because economics relates to almost all aspects of our life. As Vladimir Lenin (yes, the communist from USSR) once said: "Politics is just a high concentration of Economics." One will have to agree with this statement as most government policies will have some economic basis in them. Thus, knowing some basic economics will really help you understand the way politics work. Similarly, the foundation of economics relates to many philosophical principles (one just need to point out utilitarianism) and many historical events can be better analysed if put in the right economic context.
Thus, Economics is definitely the perfect subject to do at school. It will prepare you very well for the academic challenges you will encounter when you get to university.
