Final grade: A!!!
Take Physics 107 if:
– You will gladly spend your Thursdays night finishing assignments until 4 in the morning
– You are prepared to spend more hours on this 3 credit course than two other courses combined, cover a chapter or two a week, do two pre-reading quizzes, an assignment and a lab
– You are prepared to learn a little bit about programming
– You know a little bit of calculus (not at all necessary, but useful)
– You think Physics is interesting
Also Dr. Affleck is really, really great! He was usually very clear in class, did awesome demos, and was very approachable, best prof this term! *The demos were especially cool because we would calculate something in class (how long it would take for the period of a spring) and then actually see that our calculation worked (or if it didn’t figure out why not)!
Textbook: The textbook we used Modern Mechanics was really good (except for the chapter on Thermodynamics), it was literally like a bible to me, I carried it everywhere. The practice questions online were really helpful too!
Exams: Surprisingly I would say that the exams were doable. I bombed the first one simply because it was more on the material covered in Physics 12 rather than the material we had covered in class, I did fairly well on the second one… and I don’t know about the final, but I guess it was ok.
Labs: The labs are not extremely exciting (you measure things over and over and over again) but they are fun and generally relaxed. Also all of the work was done in class which meant that you didn’t have to do any fancy lab reports outside of class. The best part about the labs was that when we plotted the measurements they often were graphable as an exponential function e.t.c. I really like it when you get results that make mathematical sense! That was pretty cool.
Special note: GO TO TA/OFFICE HOURS! The TA’s in this course are absolutely amazing! I finally figured out that if I went to TA hours I could get a better understanding of what I was doing. Also this course really encourages collaboration between students, you really get to know everyone and sometimes 4 minds are better than one when you are trying to program something/ are stuck on the last (and usually the hardest) homework question. So working together with people was always really fun.
Cool stuff:
-We spent one tutorial analyzing how cats fall…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHhXbOhK_hs&feature=related
– Super conductors:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws6AAhTw7RA
– Conservation of angular momentum: Dr. Affleck did this demo in class
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H98BgRzpOM&feature=related
-Also for Enriched courses the class average is usually a fair bit higher than normal class averages, so even though you think you might be doing terribly, as long as you get close to the class average you will be fine in the end.
*** ok I will stop talking about this course here***
Well done on getting an A! (I only got A-, but I don’t really care lol).
Hope to see you in PHYS 108 in the new year? 🙂
Wow such a smartie! btw, are you planning to transfer into science? I’m only asking cause you seem to be taking a lot of science courses…