help ...mature student economics question

majortom77

hiya,
im hopefully going to study economics next year and would like to know how much maths skills come into the play of things. I realise with statistics and other such aspects there will be maths involved. My concern is i left school 15 years ago with only a junior cert and not much maths studied post junior. What are the maths skills that I should try and work on between now and next september?..thanks for any help...

shay_562

The level of first year maths you'll be expected to have is equivalent to getting a low-to-middling grade in the LC higher-level. (They don't impose that as a requirement, but if you don't want to struggle with the first year material as a lot of people do, you're better off coming in with a decent standard) Off the top of my head, you'd want to have a very good grasp of basic algebra and differentiation. Matrices also come up quite a bit from second year onwards. Your best bet, initially at least, might be to pick up one of those Less Stress More Success-style Leaving Cert books for higher maths and work from that.

Jammyc

Bear in mind that theres also a Maths Helproom you can go to.
We've been told its in the maths dept. monday to thursday at 1-2pm. Free for any students to attend.

andrew

If you PM me your email address I can email you the maths & stats material (lecture slides, problem sets, problem set solutions) for EC1030 last year. It'll give you an idea of what you'll need to know. If you havn't done maths for that long, and have only done it to JC level, you'll probably need a bit of a head start.

majortom77

andrew....
thanks also jammy and shay for that advice..im not sure if this is a pm or not maybe i havent got the privilege of pms yet but that sounds amazing andrew so my addy is ......micky98765@hotmail.com...that sounds like it would help me get a solid firm idea of what i need to do.......thanks again

ps....on a side note i would love to study engineering having worked in that field but have decided the maths would be too tough- do you know would it be much more stringent than economics- the level of maths needed that is

CJTobin

Looks like it wasn't a private message, MajorTom!

In order to send a PM, click the user's name and then select the second option from the drop down list. I'd also advise you to remove your e-mail address from your last post, just to be on the safe side!;)

Hope that helps!

TheAmateur

majortom77 wrote: »

ps....on a side note i would love to study engineering having worked in that field but have decided the maths would be too tough- do you know would it be much more stringent than economics- the level of maths needed that is

I don't really know how engineering maths stacks up against economics maths, but I can outline what's covered in first year anyways. It's basically a continuation of the calculus bit of the honors maths leaving cert. course, for the most part. You go into differentiation, integration, differential equations and series in a bit more detail, and then a little bit of matrices at the end. Here are the course descriptions:
http://www.tcd.ie/Engineering/undergraduate/baiyear1/modules/1E1.pdf
http://www.tcd.ie/Engineering/undergraduate/baiyear1/modules/1E2.PDF

CJTobin

shay_562 wrote: »

The level of first year maths you'll be expected to have is equivalent to getting a low-to-middling grade in the LC higher-level. (They don't impose that as a requirement, but if you don't want to struggle with the first year material as a lot of people do, you're better off coming in with a decent standard).

According to the prospectus, you're required to have at least an ordinary C3 or a higher D3 in maths, but as you said, the better your standard of maths coming in the door, the better.