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That's great background information. I wonder what the primary driver of switching out is
by vsprabhakara1 15y ago
That's great background information. I wonder what the primary driver of switching out is
- onryo 15y agoCalculus II is my guess.
- learc83 15y agoI think it's the lack of basic algebra mastery in high school that makes college math so frustrating.
- cantbecool 15y agoI'm 100% with you on that one. That was my biggest stumbling block in college, simply remembering basic algebra. The online resources were more effectual than my professors on teaching a subject.
- dxbydt 15y agoTwo of my classmates dropped out of a math graduate program. One of them actually quit right in the middle of class, saying "This is not fun anymore!". It was a Group Theory class on Galois Fields. She became a real estate agent. The other flunked his qualifiers & decided to quit the program and become a pilot (!!) instead of retaking the exams.My prof said attrition rates in math were super high.Its just not everybody's cup of tea, I guess. Among undergrads, sometimes people switch because profs demean you. Once when I was a TA, the Algorithms prof wrote an email calling a student "bozo" because he couldn't figure out shell sort ( its a stable sort algo ). Unfortunately the student was cc'ed in the email & took it badly & switched.
- waldrews 15y agowait, shell sort is stable?
- psykotic 15y agoNo, it is unstable. The striding means that two equal elements can easily be reordered. For example, after 2-sorting [(2,a), (1,b), (1,c)] by the first component you get [(1,c), (1,b), (2,a)].
- wisty 15y agoGalois Fields was when I realized I just didn't want to be a mathematician. I like math, but you can only be a professional mathematician (as opposed to a numerical modeller or some other applied mathematician) if you tackle the stuff that's so hard no other mathematician in the world can do it, or esoteric enough that only a few other mathematicians have bothered trying.
- dmoy 15y agoThere were some earlier news articles & spinoff discussions in the recent past (NYTimes, etc). http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-science-majors-change-their-mind-its-just-so-darn-hard.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-scien... Wish I had the link to discussions about it, they were better than the actual article.
- duck 15y agoHere you go: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3196377 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3196377 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3239815 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3239815