Trinity Natural Science Course

daithi666

Hey, just wondering has anybody else taken this course with physics and chemistry as their options?

I completed a year and a half and feel I have to drop out of it! I find it a very badly organised course. The departments don't seem to interact very well and as such everything seems disjointed and nothing seems to flow.

Also, I took the 'higher maths' option which I naturally assumed would continue sort of like higher and pass leaving cert. But, not at all. The maths are just so advanced. You would really have to love it to pass it. I found this misleading.

I feel disappointed because had there not been such an emphasis on the maths I think I could have gotten a degree studying what I wanted to study in the first place; chemisty.

Would love to hear what you have to say...

ApeXaviour

I did natural science choosing maths, physics and chemistry as my options. I'm now final year physics. You seem to make a couple of vague questions (that's ok, I gathered you're not feeling very sure right now and are just looking for opinions.) I'll try answer seperately. BTW since you said you've done 1.5 years I'll assume through this that you're in SF.

On the disjointedness (if that's a word, my head's in pieces now) I have to say I didn't get the same impression as yourself in my first 2 years. But maybe I had different expectations. I will agree interaction between departments is minimal, mostly because there's so many.

You realise though that things become entirely different once you go into 3rd year? When you specialise (unless you choose to jump into advanced materials) you'll be under one school, things will have more direction and be a lot more organised. So you have what? 5 months of this year left? Not much to grin and bear tbh if in the end you end up doing what you want: chemistry.

The problem you have with maths I don't get at all. Of phys/chem/maths in my leaving cert I did the worst in maths but I found it the easiest in college. You've got 2S1, 2S2 and 2S5 correct?

2S1 granted is a bit of a fickle bitch, let's ignore that for the moment.

McMurry's course 2S2 is actually the easiest believe it or not. You get Kreyszig, you learn how to do fourier series which is basically learn off the steps, takes a week or so but there's very little thinking involved. That's what? 3 questions out of 5 you have to answer on that paper, you've passed it already... ODE's and matrices again are just learn off the steps, best way to do that is practice them. In fourier series don't mind that integration by parts bs she teaches you, it's long, tedious and prone to mistakes. Grab a calculus book, go to the index and look up "tabular integration". Takes 5 mins to learn and cuts the time it takes to do fourier series questions by three. I scored 25% higher in this paper than I did in any other paper I've ever sat in my college career.

Then you've brennos course 2S5. Oh it looks like a nightmare on the outset. But it's the most predictable course on the face of the planet. All I recommend to do here is to take one past paper and learn how to do it. That's all you need, maybe do the tutorial q's for practice. The questions that will come up in the summer will be the exact same but with different numbers. Show him your answers too because there's a way to answer his questions (as I found out to my almost detriment).

In the end if I had to recommend anything, is don't waste 1.5 years of work for just 5 months that will bring you to where you want to go, if you're really serious about doing chemistry. By the way, anyone I know who was iffy about what to do and ended up in chemistry has actually really loved it. Best of luck anyway.