How To Survive Physics

[astrogirl]

Every now and then I see a lot of angst around here about physics. As someone who was a physics TA for a long time, someone with a PhD in a subfield of physics, and someone who actually failed first year physics in university, I would like to offer some advice that may help.

1. You can't cram for physics. Memorization will get you nowhere. Learning physics is like learning to play a musical instrument, or losing weight, or preparing to run a marathon. It takes consistent, regular practice.

2. Study in groups. If you're scared of all the other pre-meds in your class and you don't want to study with them, find some non-pre-meds to study with. But physics is a group activity.

3. Although I just said physics is a group activity, you need to make sure you understand how to do all of the problems. Make a personal rule that you won't hand in an answer if you don't know how you got the answer. Don't just plug in your numbers into someone else's equation. Not just because that's kind of dishonest, but because it defeats the whole purpose. Profs like to put the same kinds of thing on the tests that they assign for homework. If you understand how to do every one of your homework problems, you will have a much easier time doing well on the tests.

4. Show your work when you do your homework, solve equations symbolically and don't plug in numbers until the end, and don't just randomly write numbers all over your page. I know that now we have all of those ridiculous submit your homework online things (which don't even get me started on my rant about Mastering Physics and how awful it is) so you don't lose any marks for not showing your work. But if you show your work, you will end up with a notebook full of example problems that you can go back and read through when you are studying for a test. It also makes it a lot easier to figure out where you went wrong when you are stuck on something. If you handed your paper to someone else, they should be able to follow sequentially exactly what you did to get an answer with no verbal input from you. It's like telling a story in equations. When someone comes in and asks me for help and I ask to see what they did, it's a lot easier to figure out what went wrong if they are doing their homework like this than if they just hand me a crumpled up sheet of paper with numbers randomly scribbled all over it. As an added bonus, you are much more likely to get partial credit on exams if you show your work. Here's an example - suppose a question is out of 5 marks, and someone got it wrong. If the person has the wrong answer with bunch of random math written down, I'll probably give them 0.5/5 or maybe 1/5 for attempting to do something. But suppose the same person systematically wrote out every step they did and I can follow it, and I discover that all they did wrong was make a small calculation error, but that their work was all correct. I would then give them 4/5 or maybe even 4.5/5. The answer is usually less important than the process to the people who are marking your exams, but if they can't see your process, that makes it kind of hard.

5. Get help early. If things aren't going well, go talk to a TA or your prof. Do this the minute things aren't going well. Don't wait until 2 days before the exam, because 50 other people are also having a physics-related meltdown at the point and the TA or prof is sitting there thinking, "I wish these kids would have showed up two months ago to my office hours." Seriously, I have had days where I was supposed to be running a help session for 3 hours, and no one came in, but I had to sit there for 3 hours, and I had the wrong kind of computer to even do research on, so I basically just sat and read failblog. And then everyone comes in right before the test. Another good thing to do is if you're terrified of taking physics, go talk to the prof and the TA sometime in the first week and just tell them that. I've had people come in and say, "I haven't taken physics since high school, and I really struggled with it, and I need to get a good grade in it to get into medicine/architecture/whatever else, can you help me figure out how to study and how to approach this class so that I can do my best?" That's a perfectly respectable thing to do, and when I knew I had students who were feeling like that, I would go out of my way to help them however I could - I would send them an email if I knew that an assignment was going to be a lot longer or more difficult than usually so that they knew to start working on it earlier, I would tell them where to find extra practice problems to do, I answered all kinds of last minute emails from people who were stuck 2 hours before the assignment was due, and just did whatever I could to help. I'm sure you can imagine, though, that not all TAs are like this, which brings me to my next point.

6. If you have a horrible prof or TA, find a different one. If the prof is a bad teacher and is unapproachable, switch to a different section, take the class next semester, or even think about taking it at the school down the street. When I was at SMU, we had lots of kids from Dal take physics in our department. Usually there's more than one TA for a class, so if you find a bad TA, go to another TA's office hours or help sessions instead. If for some reason there is only one TA and that TA is unhelpful (legitimately unhelpful, not just expecting you to put some effort into things - I've heard a lot of people complain because the TA won't just tell them the answers), then you have a few options. You can try to hire a private tutor. If your university doesn't have some kind of formal tutoring service you can talk to, then go talk to the physics department secretary and they are usually willing to send around an email to the grad students to see if any of them are interested in doing some tutoring. Other things you can try are getting help from TAs at the other university down the street (if there is one) or TAs from other physics classes. Your mileage may vary with those last two, but sometimes it works. Basically the point here is that if you can't get help from the people you should be able to get help from, find someone you can get help from.

7. Don't whine about stuff. This should go without saying, and I'm not accusing any of you guys on here about being whiny, but I have had so many students who come in and say something along the lines of the following: "This is so stupid. Why do I have to know this? I'm going to be a doctor and I won't ever use this stuff! Why don't you guys do exam reviews the way they do them in the biology department? Why do we have to know all of these stupid equations? Why can't they tell us in the question what equation to use? etc, etc." This does not make people sympathetic to your cause. Especially if it's a TA you're talking to - there's often not much we can do about most of that stuff. People were always complaining that the physics TAs didn't know what was on the exam (because apparently the biology TAs did). Well, that wasn't our fault - we don't see the exams until they're over. However, if your TA is complaining about what a horrible thing Mastering Physics is and how they should have never started using it, feel free to jump right on that bandwagon.

I really hope this helps some of you!! If any of you have any questions/angst about physics, feel free to talk to me. I'm sorry it's taking a really long time to get back to the people who have sent me PMs on here, I'm just really busy right now. But I will get back to all of you eventually, I promise!

[thebouque]

Physics rocks, definitely one of my favorite premedical topics. That and calculus (especially integrals, sequences and series).

[psychoswim]

I loved physics and calculus too! And general chem.

I agree with pretty much all your points Astrogirl, especially writing down your work and not just answers. It's the best way to know that you really understand the material, and can reproduce on an exam when the data has changed.

[aaronjw]

Originally Posted by thebouque

Physics rocks, definitely one of my favorite premedical topics. That and calculus (especially integrals, sequences and series).

Can't tell if you're trying to be funny or are just a sick, sadistic bastard

[bored]

this advice goes for any course

Don't go into a course thinking you are going to get a 60. Go into it confident, and learn to like what you are studying, not complain about it at every chance you get.

[ditde]

Been cramming for the past 5 days (it's cramming because I completely neglected it for the past month and a half). Got a mid-term tomorrow, pretty sure I'm failing it.

[sirop]

I love hearing and learning about physics just out of the scholarly aspect. Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman and Brian Cox are pretty awesome. I wish I could major in it but I don't have the confidence in my math skills. But physics as a subject is so fascinating (without the number crunching)!

[thebouque]

Originally Posted by aaronjw

Can't tell if you're trying to be funny or are just a sick, sadistic bastard

Hehe you mean sadistic or masochistic?
Nah I was 100% serious!