Foreign Perspectives

Looking at course reviews before you’ve started a course seems to be completely different to looking at them once you’ve started on the same course sometimes.

Take the astronomy course that I’m doing at the moment. The key words in the reviews of it could be summed up as “fascinating” and “maths”. Critically, none of them use “challenging” (read: “very difficult”).

Reading those reviews a year ago, the course sounded quite interesting to me. The maths didn’t bother me as I’ve done quite a bit before this although I did slip in the Maths for Science (S151) course just in case my very rusty university maths needed a bit of oiling. So, in effect, it read as a fascinating course overall.

Over half-way through it has a different feel to me. There is quite a lot of maths in it or at least in the cosmology half of the course and I’d say that a glance at that section in advance would put off many a prospective student of the course. However, what I’d not allowed for was the sheer amount of time that it would take up. The course materials are, as usual, very readable but the time needed to do the assignments is far, far beyond anything that I’ve ever needed to take doing an assignment before. Quite why that should be, I’m not quite sure but it seems to be a combination of the time taken to type up all the symbols used (which is substantial, even on a short answer) and the amount of leafing back and forth to find out various facts required to answer the questions. Overall, it seems to equate to something like double or more the amount of time needed for any previous assignments that I’ve done at this level.

I’d also question the “fascinating” aspect that many mention in their comments. Yes, there are lots of pretty pictures and going through the theories as to how the various objects depicted got to be that way is interesting at the start but somehow the long list of theories that seem to build up like a freight train seems to get tedious all too often. So much so that it has me questioning whether I should carry on with physics at all. Yes, it’s that bad sometimes. Oddly, biology which seems to have just as many theories knocking around doesn’t ever seem to get to that building freight train stage and that’s puzzling.

Anyway, must get back to the assignment now… for reasons which escape me, I “knew” that the return date was May 19th but it’s actually May 14th so I need to get a move on!