Struggling With Science Courses - Need Advice

gutter
Sat, 19 Sep 2009 08:45:07 +0000

A little update:

I took my exam on Thursday and much to my pleasant surprise it was more or less a breeze. I’m expecting an A- which would be a significant improvement over what I was expecting going into the exam. I then went back to my room and crashed because I’d hardly been getting any sleep up to that point.

When I attended my lecture on Friday I also felt like I was on par with other students in terms of understanding the material, as for the first time they were asking questions that I was answering in my head before the prof answered. This is a big deal since up to this point I hardly even knew what their questions meant.

I’m wondering if my initial problems came in part from the fact that I had such a weak Chemistry background coming into this class. This is an Honors course, so most people taking it are either taking it to fulfill a requirement for our Honors college (which is significantly harder to get into than the University itself) or they’re taking it because they really enjoy going in depth into this stuff. In both cases I probably started out behind the curve because of how little I knew coming in. Either that or the material just started to click in the past day or two.

After the exam I sent out an e-mail to every other Honors Chem student asking if there was any interest in starting a regular study group across both sections of the class. I’ve gotten a few responses back thus far, so I think I’m going to start leading those in a week or two.

I’m making sure I don’t let my guard down though. I worked incredibly hard for that first exam and that probably had a lot to do with my ability to do well on it. It wouldn’t be a good idea to just assume I don’t have to work for the rest of the course.

I’m still thinking I’m going to switch over to a Mathematics major. The truth is that I find Science interesting, but only from an outsider’s perspective. As in, I think, “It’d be cool if I knew that stuff,” rather than, “I love learning that stuff.” Math, on the other hand, I really like learning, or at least I have up until this point.

Thanks for all of your responses. Hopefully thing will go better from here on out.