A year of Russian. Big mistake. Should have taken Spanish for my foreign language requirement.
Chemistry. I do just fine in Physics - learn the laws and then figure out how to apply them to increasingly difficult situations. In chemistry (it seemed to me), you start by memorizing the complicated consequences of the laws, and work out from there - which I didn’t do well with at all…
Geographic Information Systems For Beginners.
I barely got a “C”, & I’m hoping to re-take it, before moving on to Intermediate.
Calculus. Shudder.
Anatomy & Physiology, without a doubt. (Not so much physiology, because I could generally extrapolate bodily functions logically; but anatomy is mostly straight memorization, and there’s a lot to memorize.) I ended up getting the second-highest grade in the class, but it seriously monopolized my study time.
+1
Introduction to Philosophy - I disliked the material and it was hard to make myself study. One of the few classes I dreaded attending.
Biology - I sucked at making slides and dissecting grossed me out. I always had a air bubble under my slide. Stupid class frustrated me. It was a degree requirement too
Human Anatomy - the class that eventually made me drop out of med school entirely. It wasn’t so much that the class itself was hard per se - none of the material was really intellectually challenging, there was just an absurd amount of it.
No, what really made Human Anatomy a veritable nightmare was living with another med student who was a few years ahead of me, got perfectly excellent grades in all his courses and consistently great reviews after internships, and remembered absolutely fuck-all of the minutiae of Human Anatomy. The thought that I was working my fingers to the bone to pass a course that nobody actually retained information from, and the realization that Pharmacology would be a completely analogous experience, turned me off medicine entirely. It made me realize that our system for educating doctors is more interested in whether one is willing to willingly, masochistically self-flagellate than whether one has a working brain.
That would have to be Human Variations, a required course in my Anthropology track. I was on the Cultural Anthropology side, but this course dealt with hard science, never my forte. I finished uni with a 3.817 GPA but barely managed to squeak out a C in that course.
This for me, too.
Thermo 2 and Fluid Dynamics 1. I struggled in those and finally learned effective study habits.
Real Analysis I. I didn’t have to take II, thank god. I still have nightmares of epsilons and deltas. So many goddamn theorems. Limits, sequences, continuity, compactness, differentiability…so much to learn in just 12 short weeks. I thought it would be a piece of cake after getting an A+ in Calc III. Ha ha! The hardest part was the proofs often times seemed to use steps that were just unintuitive to me. Abstract Algebra, in contrast, was pretty straight forward, if not exactly easy.
Physiology was really tough, but I’m going with Meteorology as the toughest. I took it because it was a fit for the schedule I desired and I thought “hey, we’ll chat about the weather”. At the worst I thought it would be boring. I was so, so wrong. Managed to pull a C, but I think the professor nudged it up for effort.
Electron Microscopy.
As a micro biologist, I was fascinated by the knowledge gained from the electron microscope. Had an A going into the final. Ended up with a D. The professor was my grad sponsor. Figured he was trying to tell me something. It worked. A D grade didn’t look good in grad school. I moved on.
Yep, Anatomy / Physiology. Very interesting, and very challenging. Proud that I did well, but it took everything I had.
Also Exercise Physiology, although this was partly due to professors who felt their role was to use the class to weed people out.
Thermodynamics. I still have nightmares. Doesn’t help that it met at 8 in the morning!
17th and 18th Century Philosophy.
I have a bit of a rant here, in that I had taken several courses on existentialism and philosophers such as Nietzsche, but they didn’t want me to sign up for Intro to Philosophy because I had taken those classes. I didn’t know any better, I didn’t have a clue the vast chasm between Hume and Nietzsche.
So in my first advanced-level philosophy course, absent any Intro experience, I wrote my first philosophy paper and I got a C+. I was stymied. It was the worst grade I’d ever received in my life. I went to the office hours and the prof was like, ''Why didn’t you learn to write a philosophy paper in Intro?" Then I had to explain how they wouldn’t let me take Intro. I resubmitted the paper once she explained how the structure differs, and I got an A-.
I got an A- in the course which graded on a curve.
I kept my final exams; I read them now, and have no idea what I was talking about. That’s also the only time in my life I ever experienced test anxiety. I remember flooding with panic for the first 20 minutes of that exam, and I got an 83. Which yes, translated to an A- on this particular curve.
At BSU in '79, English 101 and 102 had a reputation as the toughest courses everybody had to take. Why? All the papers except the term paper were written in class only, with no notes or dictionary allowed. Any misspelling, punctuation, or grammar mistake cut the grade by a letter, and there were no D grades given. The first paper I wrote had a couple of “anyone…their” phrases and a superfluous comma. Instant F!!
The descriptivists around here wouldn’t have lasted a day in those classes.
Gross Anatomy. If I remember correctly, it was three 90 minute lectures followed by 2.5 hours of cadaver lab per week. Dissection wasn’t so bad (though dead tissue bears little semblance to live tissue), but the lectures were an endurance test of cramming minutia into your brain for rote memorization. Classes started immediately after the bell and the prof lectured non-stop and quickly for the next 80 minutes, then 10 minutes for Q &A.
It didn’t help that he had a difficult to understand accent and drew hard to decipher graphics on the overhead projector. Seems like I filled a notebook with aching fingers each lecture.
I aced both semesters, but thinking about going through that again gives me the willies.
Matrix Methods for Engineers. The professor sucked mightily. He seemed to think there was value in having us learn definitions word-for-word and spew them back on the test. OK, for me, that was the easy part. The actual matrix methods were tough, but I took my C and went home happy.
And honestly, after working as an engineer for 26 years, I can safely say I didn’t need to know any of the definitions, nor did I ever apply matrix methods. But I had to take it and I did.