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first week of university - so hard

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MJinZ said:
I finished a year of University in High School (all AP Classes). It wasn't that hard. Even AP Physics and Calculus was like meh.

You just need a few Tomes of +1 Wisdom/Intelligence.
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AP classes at my high school was harder than my classes at UCLA. I breezed through my first year at UCLA. I guess all those days bitching at my HS was actually good for me.
 
Hacp said:
I have learned over the years that there is one surefire way to pass all the classes. Buy the solution manual. The teacher usually assigns problems that are similar to the problems worked in the solution manual. Just emulate how the solution manual solves the problems and you should be fine.
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LOL, really? You couldn't figure out what you needed to pass without the solutions manual?
 
AznAnarchy99 said:
AP classes at my high school was harder than my classes at UCLA. I breezed through my first year at UCLA. I guess all those days bitching at my HS was actually good for me.
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major? my bro just finished his freshman year at UCLA and i'm trying to decide whether or not i need to kick his ass.
 
I guarantee you that you're not alone in feeling overwhelmed in your first week in college.

I remember trying to make sense of the description and uses for standard deviations given in our physics lab book, and thinking there'd be no way I could compete with people who could. Of course, it turned out that most all my classmates were quaking in their boots for the same reason.

Just do your best. Apply yourself as completely as you can. Don't do anything foolish. Set your sights on surviving until Thanksgiving. Stay the course until after the first semester. Things will likely look different by then.

Hang in there! :thumbsup:
 
PowerEngineer said:
I guarantee you that you're not alone in feeling overwhelmed in your first week in college.

I remember trying to make sense of the description and uses for standard deviations given in our physics lab book, and thinking there'd be no way I could compete with people who could. Of course, it turned out that most all my classmates were quaking in their boots for the same reason.

Just do your best. Apply yourself as completely as you can. Don't do anything foolish. Set your sights on surviving until Thanksgiving. Stay the course until after the first semester. Things will likely look different by then.

Hang in there! :thumbsup:
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Actually, better advice is to get straight As or your GPA and thus, your life and work opportunies/grad school opportunities are FUCKED.

B+s kill, not just little children. SO MAN UP or be doomed to mediocrity.
 
tokie said:
You need to learn to keep up with everything. It's not just about learning course material, it's about learning how to learn.
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More true words have never been typed! There was a point that I basically quit taking notes and started understanding (and applying in real life) what was being written/instructed. My grades went up because I had learned the material, not just memorized it.

RKS said:
nope, no trouble. I tripled majored in EE, pre-law, and pre-med. I now drink Dos Equis and cliff-dive.
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LOL. That's some funny shit right there.
 
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TecHNooB said:
major? my bro just finished his freshman year at UCLA and i'm trying to decide whether or not i need to kick his ass.
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Double major. Political Science and Communication Studies. A lot of my classes are debate and essays which come to me easily. I can write A papers the night before. Some people cant.

Its the same thing with me and math, I gota study like crazy but some people pick it up quick.

I ended up skipping a lot of my classes towards the half of the quarter. Dont ask me why, I just did and it wasnt the smartest thing to do. Most people do as well. I still ended up with a 3.7, which could of been a 4.0 if I went to classes or even studied..
 
Being only the first week of classes, and today being a holiday, I can't get any help from my TA's. I will have to ask around if there are any study groups that I can join. Good advice though guys, this helps me a little bit.
 
iGas said:
Pending school and the prof, because not all views older papers & tests are study materials because they are too lazy to change it yearly. Using old tests and papers as study guide is an automatic dismissal at the universities that I attended.
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Well, if that's the case, obviously ignore what I said.... 🙂
 
matas said:
Chemistry homework for example, is online homework, and you have to get the exact right answer to get the credit. The problems that they give me are like I never seen before in my Honors chem high school class.
I am at Rutgers university.
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Well it seems the solution to your problem would be to go to lecture, take notes, and learn the stuff again. Unless you used AP credits and placed out, they should be starting with the basics.
 
Hacp said:
Would you rather be spending 6 hours trying fruitlessly trying to figure out how to solve the problem?
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No, I would rather actually learn the material. Professors have office hours, there are TAs, other classmates to ask, and even the university library full of other books to help you figure it out. Hell, there's even the internet. If you gave up on actually doing your work yourself and turned to basically just copying stuff out of the solutions manuals that's just sad and lazy.

I finished my mechanical engineering degree a few years ago and just started on my master's. There's been some times when I've struggled to figure things out but I can honestly say that I actually understood what I've turned in, rather than just copying something out of a manual.
 
matas said:
Chemistry homework for example, is online homework, and you have to get the exact right answer to get the credit. The problems that they give me are like I never seen before in my Honors chem high school class.
I am at Rutgers university.
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you will find that getting the answers from friends or solutions manual will only serve you to get credit for the homework.

Using your friends, TA's, and Professors to understand how to solve problems will get you the A on the midterms and finals. At least that's what my experience was. In the upper level classes, the professors always said I really care not that you get the exact answer as I do, but that the work you write shows you understand the concepts.
 
Yes, college is somewhat different than high school. There, I could get straight A's with fairly minimal effort. The workload was fairly light, and reasonably simple.

First calculus test in college: 69%. It definitely took some time to get acclimated to the new workload requirements. And yes, there are "weed-out" classes early on, where they'll likely tell you that 33% of the class will fail. They're not kidding. But it isn't necessarily because the material is difficult. There are some people who just aren't cut out for doing work. They'll spend too much time partying, socializing, or just lazing about doing nothing related to the class. Test time comes, they panic, they attempt to cram, they fail, and then complain about the professor, ignoring the fact that they invested no time in trying to learn anything.



Hacp said:
Would you rather be spending 6 hours trying fruitlessly trying to figure out how to solve the problem?
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So what do you do in industry when your employer asks you to solve a problem which currently has no worked-out solution? Ideally, you should be good at solving problems, not copying someone else's solution.


And of course, some professors specifically look for how a problem is worked out. If a student's work consistently matches the solutions manual, that kind of attracts attention.
Then of course there are the professors who avoid this problem entirely by making up their own exercises, or who will say, "Do problems #8-13, except I want you to also calculate...", and then you get hit with a whole slew of stuff that wouldn't be in the solutions manual anyway. Methods used to help figure it all out are usually somewhere in the textbook, but you've got to actually spend time reading, and looking for it.
 
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