Here’s the deal: I ended up taking AP Music Theory over Organic Chemistry my senior year of high school. Did people tell me that was wrong to do because I want a career involving chemistry? Yes. Do I regret it? Absolutely not.

AP Music Theory was taught by one of my favorite teachers. I’ve had him for three years, and he always pushes students every year to sign up for the class. Even if it didn’t fit into your schedule, he just needed enough people to show interest.

In other words, fifty people could sign up for the class, but if only five people end up getting it, the class would still run for that year. I signed up for it, along with Organic Chemistry, and I only ended up in one of the classes.

I went in to see my counselor over the summer to see if there was any way I could enroll in both. Turns out, both classes ran during the same hour, so I needed to pick one. As much as I wanted to take Organic Chemistry, I ultimately decided AP Music Theory for two reasons:

Number one, AP classes look nice on college resumes. There was also an extremely high chance I’d pass the exam, which means college credit. Number two, I would have more fun in a small class with a teacher I like, and I was planning on riding the senior slide.

Many of my friends and teachers knew I was going into a science career, so they questioned my choice. I had my doubts too— that is until the first day of class. Turns out, fourteen other kids had ended up in the class with me and I was friends with at least half of them. All of the kids were music nerds like me.

What surprised me the most was the complexity of this class. I had no idea what I was getting myself into until we were given one of our first assignments: a history report on a music phenomenon that occurred in the Dark Ages.

I was surprised. The last thing I was expecting to do in that class was to give a PowerPoint presentation. Many of the topics that we could report on had nothing to do with music. It didn’t make any sense.

I ended up doing my report on Notre Dame anyway, and while researching the topic, I started to fall in love with the assignment. Listening to the other reports somehow made it easier for me to understand the evolution of music; it made it easier to understand why music is the way it is now and where theory comes from.

After that, I began to do something that I’ve never done before: accept anything and everything a teacher throws at me.

Usually, if a teacher assigned something that was “pointless” I wouldn’t put much time and effort into it. But that was the first time I wanted to dig deeper after the assignment was done. It made me excited to learn.

There would be days where he would play a short music excerpt and ask us to write down what we heard on sheet music. There would also be days where we’d talk about the spread of communism and how it reflects in Russian symphonies. It was unordinary but fantastic.

AP Music Theory was tough, I’m not going to lie, but I enjoyed constantly thinking outside of the box. It was history, philosophy, math, science, and art all combined into one class.

So no, AP Music Theory wasn’t useless to me. This class was the first class I’ve had that truly made me think.

Throughout high school, I could follow along in classes, do the homework, and pass the tests without putting much thought into it. But a chemistry teacher isn’t going to play an audio recording of an explosion and then ask us to write down the chemical formula for what we just heard.

I still love science. However, it’s clear (at least to me) why I ultimately made a better choice in taking an influential class.