Science in maynooth collge

stephmcgarr

Hey can someone tell me about science in maynooth
How many hours how much are books and is it hard

Boeing777

I posted this a few months back in another thread. It may answer your questions.

Boeing777 wrote: »

The course is great. Science in NUIM is great. The various departments that you deal with are mostly great and there's always help available. There is quite a range of subjects on offer in first year. These include: Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Computer Science, Mathematical Physics, Engineering and Maths (which is compulsory in first year). Lecturers open their office at certain times during the week for students to come visit and address any questions or issues you may have with course material. The facilities in labs are great and labs are well run.

It would be wrong for me to say that the course isn't hard because it definitely is. But that should not be something that would make you avoid it. Nothing in college is easy, that's just the fact of it. University is designed to challenge you and this course definitely does. The course is definitely do-able and you can do very well in it providing you are committed to putting some work into it. I'm not saying that you should be studying 24/7 with no time to enjoy yourself, what I mean is, you should dedicate some of your time to the course and just keep on top of the material.

Lectures usually last 50/55 minutes depending on the lecturer. Some lecturers like to speak more than others :pac: Lectures usually begin at 5 past the hour and end at 5 to so you can get to your next lecture in time.

Lectures usually start at 9am but that depends on your timetable. You might have a 9am start or you might have a 11am start it all depends on your timetable. Lectures finish at 6 but in first year my latest lecture ended at 4.

The course would be difficult. I wasn't expecting it to be a walk in the park but at times I felt it was quite difficult particularly when it came to maths. My maths ability is poor so naturally I was going to struggle with it. There is however an awful lot of help available for maths so I wouldn't worry about it if you weren't the best at maths. I know of many people who did OL maths for the leaving cert (including myself) and got on fine. But to answer your question, no it wasn't any more harder than I expected. The level of difficulty is definitely manageable.

First year is busy in that you will have a lot of labs, tutorials and lectures. The breakdown of my hours were as follows (other subjects may vary):

Lectures: 12 hours (4 subjects x 3 hour lectures each)
Labs: 7 hours (3 hours for Biology, 2 for chemistry and 2 for physics)
Tutorials: 3 hours (Maths 1 hour, Chemistry 1 hour, Physics 1 hour)

So that's 22 hours.

I do Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Maths. I'll comment briefly on what I covered in my modules.

Biology: In first semester we covered Biochemistry, Genetics, Microbiology and Evolutionary biology relating to genetics. In second semester we covered Evolutionary Biology relating to organisms and how they're related and stuff like that :rolleyes:, we also covered Animal Physiology, Plant structure & transportation and finally Ecology.

Chemistry: In first semester it was very much an introduction to basic chemistry. It's designed for those who have not done chemistry before. In second semester we covered Thermodynamics, Chemical trends, Kinetics and a lot of Organic Chemistry.

Physics: In first semester we covered Mechanics and astronomy. In second semester we covered Optics and Waves, Electricity & Magnetism and Modern Physics.

Maths: First semester we had two modules; Differential Calculus and Linear Algebra. In second semester we had two modules again; Integral Calculus and Introduction to Data Analysis.


Hope this helps!

stephmcgarr

Boeing777 wrote: »

I posted this a few months back in another thread. It may answer your questions.

Wow thanks so much This has been a great help. I'm starting in September and just really nervous about what it was all about