hi i’m almost finishing up my first year now
i really like the classes i’ve taken so far, moreso this sem than the last coz first sem was pretty introductory. but this sem i took math 2 (basically multi variable calculus and statistics), probability and real analysis.
math 2 is a pretty standard class and not too hard, it kinda makes sense coz it’s mostly just generalising single variable calculus stuff to higher dimensions, the stats part can be a bit harder though as there’s quite a bit of content but once you’re familiar with the basics it’s alright. it’s fun if you like calculus, but tbh the other classes i’ve taken have ended up being more interesting
then for probability, i really wasn’t expecting to like this class because i disliked prob in high school but i actually ended up liking it quite a bit. we go into more interesting distributions and also a bit more complex ideas, such as the law of total expectation (basically lets you calculate expectation with conditional probabilities), moment generating functions (lets you calculate expectation and variance indirectly), and markov chains (about how things transition from one state to another). it can be a bit challenging at times mainly because we get a shorter amount of time for a large amount of questions, but it’s still moderate in terms of the difficulty. it’s much much more fun than high school probability though, it’s not really just pluggin into formula and usually you have to think through the situation a lot more (no combinatorics though thankfully).
then there’s real analysis, this is by far my favourite class and hardest class i’ve taken so far. essentially it’s all proof based, and you prove a lot of properties about calculus and the real numbers. we established stuff more rigorously like the riemann integral, what a limit means, continuity, etc, and also proved a lot of interesting results (eg we just proved the fundamental theorem of calculus yesterday). we also eventually learn about more interesting methods to evaluate integrals like the gamma function and leibniz rule. pretty fun to see all of the things that were kinda taken for granted in other classes like limits and to see the “why” behind a lot of calculus, it can get abstract and challenging though but thankfully on our tests our lecturer is nice to us and won’t make us prove too crazy of theorems lol.
so far i’ve liked it a lot, for me the pace of the classes in sem one was a bit slow (mainly just because it was introductory subjevrs that were a bit similar to high school), still fun but this sem it’s been much faster and content is more enjoyable, challenging and new. i’d recommend it if you want to study math, but i would also go into it with a bit of a career plan too. there are a lot of jobs you can get with just a bachelors, mainly in data science/banks/software type of areas, but like a lot of other areas of science you usually need to do at least an honours year to reach into more jobs. so just make sure you’re ready to commit for a bit longer study depending on what you want to do
may i ask how the course is going so far and any advice?
even taking liamk’s course too damn