A lot of us 24s felt a bit frazzled during the summer of 2020, for a myriad of reasons: some related to the pandemic and politics, and others related to what the start of college would look like. I’m happy to report that a lot of us managed to make it work. After all, I spent fall term on campus and was able to connect with many people for whom this kind of adjustment took different forms. Personally, I’m really happy with my decision to enroll in MATH 8 (Calculus of One and Several Variables) and CHEM 10 (Honors First-Year General Chemistry) simultaneously, in spite of all the general advising saying otherwise. Of course, bathing in a stew of molecular orbitals and Lagrange multipliers isn’t the freshman fall experience everyone is looking for, but I got a lot out of it. I learned to navigate the rapid-fire pace of new material; interactions with many professors, TAs, tutors, and classmates; and learning 100% on my own time.
CHEM 10 is designed for students who have yet to learn the more-advanced concepts of general chemistry, but have shown their aptitude for and dedication to the discipline by performing well on an AP or similar exam. Little did I know that this class held a lot more than beefed-up ICE problems. The initial tone was instead set by molecular orbital and valence bond theory, both of which are fancy ways (despite being woeful simplifications of Schrödinger’s Equation) to model the probability of finding electrons in orbitals described by different kinds of symmetry in different locations relative to the nuclei. Some of the conceptual realms we entered afterwards weren’t as immediately daunting, but I still love how intense this class is.
MATH 8 was another case of hitting the ground running. In AP Calculus AB, it took the whole school year to meander from limits to derivatives to integrals, which we dismissed as trivial review and moved on to new material within the first class meeting. A lot of us developed love-hate relationships with series and sequences. Their many associated tests and cameos in Taylor and Maclaurin Series was a lot to process all at once, but at least we learned how calculators churn out all those decimals for random square roots and such. After a short layover in introductory vectors, we wasted no time in reaching 3D geometry, calculus of vector-valued functions, and finally: multivariable calculus. The friendly “limit as x approaches 0” had reappeared as “the limit as x, y, and z approach 0.” This is another crazy but pretty cool (and important for STEM majors) class.
After all the lofty concepts and intricate and creative problem-solving required in my other two courses this term, I chose to explore another interest in a completely different discipline. Electing CRWT 12 had the appealing bonus of allowing me to Not Go Insane. Throughout high school, I developed an interest in writing poetry, hence my enrollment in Introduction to Poetry. Despite the relaxed atmosphere in this class and the fact that we only used half of our synchronous meeting times for the first half of the term still packed a punch. We read a lot of poems as a class, read an entire anthology to identify a poet of choice for a presentation later in the term, all the while drafting and getting feedback on (first from the professor and later from classmates) on all the poem drafts we created. This eventually evolved into a final portfolio, enclosed here.