<p>Going for Electrical Engineering, nonexistent knowledge of physics, good at calculus. Should I just take university physics (required) or should I start with college physics as base (not required?)</p>
<p>If I already took calculus and did well, will I need any subjects in preparation to university physics?</p>
<p>Take non-calc physics first to learn the concepts.</p>
<p>The concepts aren’t too difficult. If you grasp ideas pretty quickly I’d say go straight for the calc based course. Also, depending on what levels of math you’re in, you’ve probably done some physics already. Calc 1 should’ve covered applications of position/velocity/acceleration, calc 2 dealt with work, newton’s laws, springs, and other maths use physics in their applications problems. So if none of that threw you off physics shouldn’t be an issue.</p>
<p>If you take a general course first you’ll probably be sitting through a lot of stuff you already learned when take the calculus one.</p>
<p>+1 for taking Calc based.</p>
<p>There really isn’t a ton of calc in the calc based one any way. but regardless, like the other poster said, you will be bored out of your mind if you take trig based phys then take the calc based phys.</p>
<p>Just remember that studying in college is WAY different than high school (ie more and more depth). With physics you need to take your time and understand what exactly is going on in the situation. Your math skills will not save you if you don’t understand the concept and all the possible variables.</p>
<p>It might be a good idea to just look over a trig-based physics textbook over the summer. Nothing expensive, in fact those Demystified books and the For Dummies books could do. Don’t take the trig course, study it yourself at your own pace before the more advanced class. That’s all you really need to be prepared for the Calculus-based physics course.</p>
<p>The (potential) problem with having calc-based physics as your introduction to physics rather than dumbed-down high school physics is that in dumbed-down high school physics you learn concepts intuitively. Work is force times displacement. In calc-based physics they will tell you work is the dot product of force and displacement, or the integral of differential work elements, which it is, but when taught about work this way you it may not be intuitively obvious that work is force times displacement, only in the dot product version we’re only concerned with the component of force in the direction of displacement. That’s one example. My first ever physics class was just a few years ago and didn’t even have any trig, but I think I benefited greatly from it because I was learning concepts first and foremost.</p>
<p>Then again, my calc-based class used the Halliday and Resnick book, which is terrible at explaining concepts. Maybe your class will use a different book.</p>