The Captain
Junior Associate
Hugs are good...
Joined: Jan 4, 2011 16:21:23 GMT -5
Posts: 8,717
Location: State of confusion
Favorite Drink: Whinnnne
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Post by The Captain on Dec 9, 2013 19:48:05 GMT -5
Orthogonal Functions and Boundary Value Problems . . . . . . made my head hurt . . . Is that in English or maybe another language I don't recognize?
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Virgil Showlion
Distinguished Associate
Moderator
[b]leones potest resistere[/b]
Joined: Dec 20, 2010 15:19:33 GMT -5
Posts: 27,448
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Post by Virgil Showlion on Dec 9, 2013 20:41:33 GMT -5
Whenever you're playing music and your music player has a spectrum analyzer, e.g. Each of the bars represents the magnitude of a particular frequency (or group of frequencies) in the sound the speakers are currently producing. A "frequency" is just a wave that oscillates (wiggles) at a certain speed. All of the waves are orthogonal to each other. Hence, think of each of the bars a representing an orthogonal function, where the height of a bar represents how much energy its function is adding to the sound. And now you know something about orthogonal functions.
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dannylion
Junior Associate
Gravity is a harsh mistress
Joined: Dec 18, 2010 12:17:52 GMT -5
Posts: 5,212
Location: Miles over the madness horizon and accelerating
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Post by dannylion on Dec 9, 2013 20:43:07 GMT -5
Classical Chinese and Tang poetry. I hated life while I was taking those courses, but I was really glad I had done it when it was all over. If you survive, you come out on the other side with a firm grasp of the proper care and feeding of Chinese function words, which is how Chinese does grammar. There are many, many Chinese function words, all of which behave differently from each other, and each one can behave differently in different contexts. An obscure function word can bring one to tears if one does not know what to do with it.
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TheOtherMe
Distinguished Associate
Joined: Dec 24, 2010 14:40:52 GMT -5
Posts: 28,088
Mini-Profile Name Color: e619e6
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Post by TheOtherMe on Dec 9, 2013 22:43:55 GMT -5
Hardest (now this was back in the mid-70's and I don't remember the exact name) was Native American History or something like that, followed by Statistics. I got to take Statistics both as an undergrad and as a grad student. Got more out of it in grad school, but it was the 2nd time through the course. I didn't even attempt the test to pass out of the class in grad school.
My favorite classes were all of my accounting classes. I loved every one of them. Intermediate is the most difficult, but I would work through the problems. Our professor was from Egypt and very difficult to understand. If you did not pay attention and watch as he worked problems on the chalk board, you did not do well on the tests.
I attended a small college. We had 6 accounting majors that year, 3 women and 3 men. The 3 women all graduated summa semen laude. The 3 men all got C's in our accounting classes. Don't know what they did in other courses. The three men are all CPAs now, so you can become a CPA and graduate college with all C's.
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whoisjohngalt
Junior Associate
Joined: Dec 18, 2010 14:12:07 GMT -5
Posts: 9,140
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Post by whoisjohngalt on Dec 9, 2013 22:56:24 GMT -5
Statistics and Economics. I just kept thinking that it was such BS and couldn't believe it was actually a class and a profession for some.
Loved all my law classes. And history
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sunshinegal1981
Established Member
Joined: Jan 2, 2011 12:40:31 GMT -5
Posts: 373
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Post by sunshinegal1981 on Dec 9, 2013 23:39:24 GMT -5
"Homosexuality in English Renaissance Literature" goes down as one of my faves.
I still regret not taking the massively popular sociology course on "Sexual Deviance".
Ahhhh, college. *Sniff.*
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aliciar6
Familiar Member
Joined: Oct 11, 2011 10:34:31 GMT -5
Posts: 594
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Post by aliciar6 on Dec 10, 2013 8:25:12 GMT -5
I would say Chemical Engineering Themodynamics II the professor was HARD and he gave the craziest reactions that the grad students couldn't figure out...you could get 1/4 of a point on a question and the test was worth 15 points...lots of people got 6's.
Also Electrical Engineering for non-majors. it didn't help that it was at 730 AM and yeah I didn't study. chemical engineer process control was definately not easy either, the equations were crazy.
In grad school, I think solid state physics was the hardest after that compressible flow. I really had to study a lot for both of those.
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aliciar6
Familiar Member
Joined: Oct 11, 2011 10:34:31 GMT -5
Posts: 594
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Post by aliciar6 on Dec 10, 2013 8:27:14 GMT -5
Simpson had bumper stickers that said "I survived P-chem". So glad I didn't have to take it. My understanding was O Chem was the big bad course in the chemistry cirriculum. i think Organic Chem was definately harder than P-Chem. I loved P-Chem 1 and 2
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sheilaincali
Senior Member
Joined: Dec 19, 2010 17:55:24 GMT -5
Posts: 4,131
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Post by sheilaincali on Dec 10, 2013 10:10:21 GMT -5
My bachelor's is in Interior Design and Construction Management (emphasis on the ID) I found a math loop hole and took a logic and critical thinking class instead and my sciences were all of the Rocks for Jocks variety (geology, astronomy, etc)
My hardest class in my major was the Introduction to Interior Design. Our professor was old school so we spent 4 hours every week looking at slides of furniture through the ages (like bronze era up through modern times).
We had to make a book of every slide with a detailed description of every picture- which was very time consuming. The tests were brutal but something I exceled at. He'd show us a slide and we'd have like 30 seconds to answer all the questions related to the slide- what year the chair was made, name of the furniture area (like Louis XIV), what kind of wood was used, fabric, and any other defining characteristics. It was brutal. We'd do like 100 slides a week so when we took the test it would cover over one thousand photos.
Sounds fluffy compared to Organic Chem and all these advanced I realize but it was my hardest class. And it messes with your head permanently. It's very difficult to follow the plot of a show or movie when you are mentally identifying all of the furniture in the room
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teen persuasion
Senior Member
Joined: Dec 20, 2010 21:58:49 GMT -5
Posts: 4,161
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Post by teen persuasion on Dec 10, 2013 11:07:33 GMT -5
Most fun and easiest class: Reproductive biopsychology. Boring do-it-in-my-sleep class: some random business class, Management maybe? (the majors were tearing their hair out over it). Fun classes: Shakespeare I & II Hardest classes are more difficult to determine - it's just all beginning to blur together now. Many of my CSC courses were interesting and fun; it was the lab portion (AKA the coding projects) that were the killers. For Programming Languages, we spent 1/2 the semester on C, 1/2 the remaining time on ADA, 1/2 the remaining time on LISP, so there was only one week left by the time we got to Prolog, and we did a project in each highlighting a dominant feature of each. I seem to remember that the concurrency wouldn't work in ADA on our system, so that project was a bust. Compiler was a killer the first time around; piece of cake w/ a better instructor the second. Some of the Physics was challenging; I can't remember which of the 3 semesters, though. Discrete & Linear blur together now (same instructor). Trying to tease apart which major courses I liked vs. disliked, I think it depended more on the prof than on the subject. Anything taught by Ron was dry as dust (Storage Structures ); most of the other profs were excellent, if challenging (major understatement).
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tractor
Senior Member
Joined: Jan 4, 2011 15:19:30 GMT -5
Posts: 3,489
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Post by tractor on Dec 10, 2013 11:16:17 GMT -5
Limnology was the worst class I ever had to take, too much complex math mixed with Chemistry and Biology.
Easiest class was Mythology, with Organic Chemistry coming in a close second.
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Deleted
Joined: Oct 7, 2024 23:32:28 GMT -5
Posts: 0
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Post by Deleted on Dec 12, 2013 17:52:37 GMT -5
The hardest was a library science class on research. The teacher basically stood up there and said, "Here's an index that is important. Here is another index that is important. Here's an index that tells you which indices are important."
I ended up with an 89.6 in the class. I got a B because she does not round up. As she put it, "You made a very high B in the class, but nonetheless it is a B."
I have over 100 graduate hours because I am ABD in Rhetoric and Comp. The library degree came a few decades later. I made an A in every graduate course except this one. Obviously, I still resent it.
Easiest one was a technology course that was also for the library degree. I had to create a web page, write a paper on an emerging technology, etc. I had to demonstrate that I could run the vcr and dvd player, etc. The kids I teach made me practice because they were scared I would fail (our vcr/dvd player is VERY quirky, but hers wasn't). I can't believe they gave graduate-level credit for that, but I was getting certification as a school librarian. They are often the technology experts.
The most interesting course I ever took was an undergraduate course in social stratification. The rich really are different, as Fitzgerald would say.
I never took the level of math/science that you guys did, but I never found those hard. In fact, I am one of the only people I know who has a Bachelor of Science in English and social studies as opposed to a Bachelor of Arts. I also took additional low-level math courses for my electives because they were "easy." Remember, though, that this was low-level. They were easy A's in my opinion.
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MN-Investor
Well-Known Member
Joined: Dec 20, 2010 22:22:44 GMT -5
Posts: 1,973
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Post by MN-Investor on Dec 12, 2013 19:15:31 GMT -5
Oh, it was so long ago!
I know I was getting real tired of calculus by the time I took my 4th semester in it in college (Multivariable Calculus). At that point I think I figured out that I really didn't want to spend my life as a mathematician.
I was a double major (math and accounting), but I took lots of classes outside of my majors and I loved those - astronomy, Shakespeare, music theory, etc. That was the really fun time in college!
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NoNamePerson
Distinguished Associate
Is There Anybody OUT There?
Joined: Dec 17, 2010 17:03:17 GMT -5
Posts: 26,212
Location: WITNESS PROTECTION
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Post by NoNamePerson on Dec 13, 2013 16:37:26 GMT -5
From the 1st grade on I hate anything resembling math. And I wind up being a bookkeeper - go figure. One of my favorite classes in college was World Religions. Went to small state liberal arts college in small town. In walks professor looking like a real hippie from CA and says: Hello students, my name is Dr. Paskins and I am an athetist and am here to teach you about the world's religions. My only regret was that I took it in summer as elective and class only lasted 6 weeks.
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tskeeter
Junior Associate
Joined: Mar 20, 2011 19:37:45 GMT -5
Posts: 6,831
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Post by tskeeter on Dec 13, 2013 17:48:41 GMT -5
Hardest - business calculus (we covered material in one class that the math majors covered in three classes)
Easiest - business law (there aren't really any wrong answers, just ineffective arguments) marketing (common sense - I only went to class twice, only read a few pages of the text book, still got a B)
Most Fun - economics (the theory of elasticitly of supply and demand led to an informal study of behavioral finance for the last several decades)
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