Another vote here for Quantum Mechanics. I was doing quite well as a Physics major until the day that teacher walked in and announced “Everything you were taught about Physics is wrong. All your deepest intuitions about how the world works are misguided.”
And so it began. That electron can get from here to there without ever being detected in between? Oooo-kay. Even when there’s an arbitrarily high voltage “wall” between here and there? Hmmmm. The wave function doesn’t collapse until when? Action at a distance isn’t possible except when it is?
Give me a good old-fashioned macro-world dynamics problem anytime.
Some parents bend their children’s minds by reading them Alice in Wonderland. I tell mine quantum mechanics stories instead. :dubious:
Being that it’s only my second semester in college, I would have to say my hardest college course is the honors course in which I am enrolled here at school. The course proposes questions such as “What do we know? What do we believe?” And approaches these questions from literary, philosophical, artistic, and historical angles and is designed to get the student to think and really dissect the question and it’s meaning so that we can better understand the world around us. It is a great class, but the thesis papers are hell.
It has to be Engineering and fracture mechanics. So many people fail this course, that it is now purely coursework based. It’s the only exam that I’ve come out of nearly in tears. I passed purely on mky coursework. This is because after the Professor left the tutorial, the demonstrators would give us the answers. I think this is similar to the <b> Strength of materials </b> course that some others have been on about, but worse!
I also suck at anything that has electrical circuits in it, be it electronics or semiconductors, I just can’t do it!
Life Drawing…jeebus, it was so much work and I found the human form so difficult.
Also, there was this Agricultural Ecology class I had to take a few quarters ago that was an undergrad course with only four undergrads in it out of thirty students. So the proffessor decided to teach it on a graduate level. I have never worked so hard to understand so little.
I thought all the supposed “weeder” courses I took as a lower division undergrad were pretty easy (even the ones that weren’t in my major that I took for my own amusement/enrichment) but upper division is kicking my ass.
My B.S. is in Chemical Engineering. I developed a deep loathing for my major by the time I finished it. Frankly, I hated just about every course in the degree program. Unfortunately, I had to graduate with a technical degree (preferably engineering) in a reasonable amount of time, as the U.S. Navy (NROTC) had my ass in a sling, and by the time I realized how much I hated the program, I was too far into it.
Highlights of loathing:
Organic Chemistry: nothing made sense. I struggled through first semester with a C, and dropped the second semester after scoring a 20% on the first exam. (I had a friend who got a 3% on that exam! (No, that’s not a typo.) Of all the classes to offer in the following summer session, my university happened to offer second semester Organic, so I made through six weeks of hell with a B.
Physical Chemistry: thought it would be great. I loved general chemistry, and P.Chem is just more in-depth, right? Wrong. I never understood all of the equations of state with the partial differential equations, which of course leads to…
Partial Differential Equations: took it three times (dropped the first two times). Finally did well after devoting 40+ hours/week to this one course.
Reactor Kinetics: took this only twice (dropped the first time). Finally did well the second time.
Control Systems: what the fuck is a Laplace Transform, anyway?!
Transport Phenomena: transport of mass, momentum, and heat. More fucking differential equations.
Thank God I went back to school and picked up a Master’s in Environmental Engineering!
Jeez, I’ve been out of school for nigh-on 30 years, but it’s all coming back…
Ditto what Max Torque and trom said. I entered as a math major, and zipped through calculus. Ground to a halt on Differential Equations, and switched my major to Comp Sci.
I still needed one more upper division math class for the major, though, and kept putting it off…finally wound up with some godawful esoteric thing like Ring Theory. Prof offered me a choice between a D+ (which would give me the opportunity to retake the class) or C- (which would be stuck on my GPA forever). I took the C- and considered myself blessed.
It seems like half my freshman friends came to school planning to be doctors. Organic Chem turned most of them into History majors.
Took a Philosophy class that might as well have been in Greek. I still have nightmares about plowing through Spinoza…
You’re kidding, right? You couldn’t take notes after two hours of class? I have between four and six hours of class a day, almost always in a row! Every semester! The worst semester was spring of my sophomore year where I had Laboratory Intro. to Embedded Control from 9-12 (yes, 3 hours of ONE class), then Computer Components and Operations from 12-2, and then Circuits (probably close to your EE 101) from 2-4. Seven hours of class, every Monday and Thursday. And, Circuits and COCO also met for two hours on Tuesdays as well. I had 16 hours of class that semester for just 12 credits, whereas most non-engineers have less than 16 hours for their 16 credits. Being an engineer is just not fair
robby, I was waitiing for someone to mention chemical engineering. Transport Phenomena and Physical Chemistry drove me right to the brink. I don’t know what the hell a LaPlace transform is, either, and I’ve forced out of my brain everything relating to chemical engineering. Since I’m a history major now, I’ll be poor but I’ll be sane. Transport takes the cake.
In my major, we had a class that was supposed to take care of all the math credits you needed. A hellish mix of statistics, integrals, and algebra. Biiig mistake. It probably didn’t help that it was taught by this jackass physics professor who kept saying things like “you all should know this stuff by now” when, clearly, we didn’t.
I’m on the last year of my 20-year plan (sigh). Last night I walked into my Astronomy for dummies class only to hear the professor announce that she is an aerospace engineer. That got no reaction, so she said she’s a rocket scientist. When a few people giggled, she said that she meant that literally. In the so-called “refresher” lecture that she presented last night, she’s already slammed me with a few equations that I’ve never heard before.
I’m an English major for a reason. :eek: Will I be able to pass this course and still graduate magna cum laude? Time will tell. But so far, this shows every indication of being the hardest course for me.
As far as courses within my major/minor go, I’d have to say the most difficult was a course in the history of ancient Rome. It’s not that the material was difficult–it wasn’t–it’s just that there was a whale of a lot of information to cover in the course of the semester.
The hardest class I ever took was a required English course. It sounds silly but the teacher made it hard as hell for me. Basically I thought she was a major twat and all her opinions on the material were really ridiculous, and it turned out that the answers to the open-ended questions on the tests and quizzes weren’t my opinions but hers.
I had always been taught that there were no wrong answers in literature, just bad arguments. Needless to say, I refused to be a robot and dropped the class.
