Becoming a nurse requires a specific set of science, math, and liberal arts subjects that build on each other from high school through your nursing degree. The exact courses vary slightly by program, but the core subjects are remarkably consistent across schools: biology, chemistry, anatomy and physiology, microbiology, psychology, and statistics form the foundation before you ever take a nursing class.
High School Subjects That Prepare You
If you’re still in high school, the subjects you choose now can make your transition into a nursing program significantly smoother. Five areas matter most: biology, chemistry, math (particularly algebra and statistics), English, and psychology or health sciences. Biology lays the groundwork for understanding the human body. Chemistry prepares you for medication knowledge and lab work. Math supports dosage calculations you’ll use every day as a nurse. English builds the reading and writing skills essential for clinical documentation. And psychology helps develop the empathy and patient understanding that nursing demands.
Taking Advanced Placement, honors, or dual enrollment versions of these courses gives you an edge. Dual enrollment courses can even count toward your college prerequisites, saving time and money down the road.
College Prerequisites Before Nursing School
Before you’re accepted into a nursing program, you’ll need to complete a set of prerequisite courses at the college level. These are the subjects that weed out unprepared students and ensure you have the science background to handle clinical coursework. Most programs require all prerequisites to be completed with a grade of C or higher, and some require them to have been taken within the last 10 years.
The standard prerequisites include:
- Human anatomy (lecture and lab)
- Human physiology (lecture and lab)
- Microbiology (lecture, with lab usually required)
- General biology or introductory cellular and molecular biology
- Chemistry, ranging from introductory chemistry to two semesters of general chemistry with labs, depending on the program
- Nutrition
- Statistics
- Developmental psychology
- Introductory psychology
- Introductory sociology
Anatomy, physiology, and microbiology are the heaviest lifts. Many programs want at least two of those three completed before you even apply. The lab components aren’t optional extras; they’re where you learn to work with specimens, microscopes, and the kind of hands-on observation that translates directly to clinical settings.
The Nursing Entrance Exam
Most nursing programs require you to pass an entrance exam, and the most common one is the TEAS (Test of Essential Academic Skills). It has 170 questions spread across four subject areas, with a total time limit of about three and a half hours.
Science is the largest section, with 50 questions covering human anatomy and physiology (18 questions), biology (9), chemistry (8), and scientific reasoning (9). Reading has 45 questions testing comprehension and analysis. Mathematics has 38 questions on algebra, numbers, measurement, and data interpretation. English and language usage rounds it out with 37 questions on grammar, vocabulary, and writing conventions. Your scores in these areas determine whether you’re academically ready for the program, and competitive programs use them to rank applicants.
ADN vs. BSN: How the Subjects Differ
There are two main paths to becoming a registered nurse: an Associate Degree in Nursing (ADN), which takes about two years, and a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN), which takes four. Both share the same core prerequisites (chemistry, anatomy, biology, psychology, English) and the same foundational nursing subjects like nursing fundamentals, medical-surgical nursing, pediatric nursing, community health, and psychiatric nursing.
Where they diverge is depth. A BSN includes roughly 44 credits of liberal arts courses on top of 20 credits of science prerequisites. The additional coursework covers theoretical nursing concepts, public health, nursing ethics, research methods, and pathophysiology in greater detail. A BSN also includes subjects like healthcare informatics, health policy, and evidence-based practice that prepare you for leadership roles. An ADN focuses more tightly on clinical skills and getting you into practice faster.
Core Subjects Inside the Nursing Program
Once you’re admitted to a nursing program, the coursework shifts from general science to nursing-specific subjects. These fall into two categories: classroom theory and clinical practice. You’ll take both simultaneously for most of the program.
Health assessment is one of your first nursing courses. You learn to perform comprehensive head-to-toe physical exams on patients of every age. Fundamentals of nursing introduces the nursing process itself: how to assess patient needs, build care plans, and carry out interventions. These two courses form the base that everything else builds on.
Pathopharmacology is where the chemistry and anatomy prerequisites pay off. This subject combines the study of disease processes with the study of medications: how drugs work in the body, their therapeutic uses, side effects, dosage calculations, and how they interact with different conditions. Many programs split this into two semesters, starting with foundations and advancing to more complex drug-disease relationships.
From there, you move into population-specific subjects. Adult health nursing covers care for the general adult population. Gerontological nursing focuses on older adults and the unique challenges of aging. Psychiatric-mental health nursing addresses conditions like depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders. Family-centered maternity nursing covers pregnancy, labor, delivery, and postpartum care. Pediatric nursing covers care for infants through adolescents. Community and population health nursing shifts your lens from individual patients to the health of entire communities.
Rounding out the curriculum are subjects in nursing ethics and health policy, healthcare technology and informatics, evidence-based practice and research, and professional development. These may sound abstract compared to pharmacology, but they’re practical: ethics courses prepare you for the difficult decisions you’ll face in every shift, informatics teaches you the electronic health record systems you’ll use daily, and evidence-based practice teaches you how to evaluate whether a treatment actually works.
Clinical Rotations
Clinical rotations are the hands-on counterpart to your classroom subjects. You’ll rotate through multiple healthcare settings, each tied to a subject you’re studying. Common rotation areas include long-term care facilities, acute care hospitals, medical-surgical units, pediatric wards, labor and delivery units, mental health facilities, and community health settings. Each rotation pairs you with a supervising nurse and gives you real patient contact, starting with basic tasks like vital signs and building toward managing multiple patients independently. The clinical hours are substantial, often matching or exceeding your classroom time.
Subjects for Advanced Practice Roles
If you want to go beyond a registered nurse role and become a nurse practitioner, nurse educator, or nurse executive, you’ll need a Master of Science in Nursing (MSN). The subjects at this level build directly on your BSN foundation but go considerably deeper.
All MSN students take core courses in population health, health policy and politics, healthcare informatics, and interdisciplinary leadership. After the core, your subjects depend on your specialization. A family nurse practitioner takes advanced health assessment, advanced pharmacology, and advanced pathophysiology, then completes hundreds of clinical hours diagnosing and treating patients across the lifespan. A psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner follows a similar pattern but focuses on mental health conditions in children, adults, and across populations, with 780 or more clinical hours in psychiatric settings. A nurse educator studies curriculum theory, teaching strategies, and completes practicums in academic settings. A nurse executive focuses on healthcare finance, strategic planning, quality and safety, and leadership.
The thread connecting every stage of nursing education is the same: strong science foundations first, then progressively more specialized and clinical coursework. The subjects you take in your first college biology class directly inform the advanced pathophysiology you’ll study years later in a graduate program.