What has been your overall experience with large introductory science classes as a student
Depends on topic.
If it’s humanities, social sciences, or biological sciences, you are wasting your time in large intro classes. Try to write to the professors in higher levels and see if you can’t skip the lower levels. The faster you reach high level coursework, the better. You know you’ve hit high level coursework when your assigned readings are primary literature and your turned-in assignments have primary literature citations. You can make up any missed knowledge on the fly with a simple google search.
If it’s chemistry, computer science, or anything quantitative (physics, math, engineering) then you need to sit though the intro course if you aren’t totally confident that you know the material, because the next course will be extremely cumulative on the knowledge you gain here.
(I may be biased, since most of my interests have been in biological/social sciences and so I might just have known more about those things starting out).
You know you’ve hit high level coursework when your assigned readings are primary literature and your turned-in assignments have primary literature citations.
This does not apply to math or physics, where you use textbooks up until you do independent research at the Masters or PhD level.
My interpretation of that sentence was that it was intended to apply only to humanities, social sciences, or biological sciences based on the context of the paragraph it resides in.
What 9eB1 said is how I intended it to be interpreted.
Also, that’s a big part of the reason I like biological and social sciences better than chemistry/physics, despite being of a quantitative mindset. I’m impatient to get to the science part.
Depends on topic.
If it’s humanities, social sciences, or biological sciences, you are wasting your time in large intro classes. Try to write to the professors in higher levels and see if you can’t skip the lower levels. The faster you reach high level coursework, the better. You know you’ve hit high level coursework when your assigned readings are primary literature and your turned-in assignments have primary literature citations. You can make up any missed knowledge on the fly with a simple google search.
If it’s chemistry, computer science, or anything quantitative (physics, math, engineering) then you need to sit though the intro course if you aren’t totally confident that you know the material, because the next course will be extremely cumulative on the knowledge you gain here.
(I may be biased, since most of my interests have been in biological/social sciences and so I might just have known more about those things starting out).
This does not apply to math or physics, where you use textbooks up until you do independent research at the Masters or PhD level.
My interpretation of that sentence was that it was intended to apply only to humanities, social sciences, or biological sciences based on the context of the paragraph it resides in.
What 9eB1 said is how I intended it to be interpreted.
Also, that’s a big part of the reason I like biological and social sciences better than chemistry/physics, despite being of a quantitative mindset. I’m impatient to get to the science part.