/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.10211247]

>fail E&M
>have to take it again next year
>very good chance that I'll fail it again next time

what the fuck am i supposed to do
i studied for weeks and weeks but nothing stuck in my head. the tests are open book and open note, but I just can't fucking understand the problems.

[Anonymous No.10211256]

Liftschitz and Landau

[Anonymous No.10211260]

Quit making excuses. If you are smart enough to get into a stem program you are smart enough to finish it.

Honestly you can get a guaranteed 50% by just knowing Gauss and Ampere and they are very similar.

[Anonymous No.10211262]

>>10211247
Phys 2 or 400 level em?

[Anonymous No.10211275]

>>10211262
It's the upper level version. I can understand the math most of the time, but since every problem has to be done in a different way, I have no idea how to approach any single problem.

>>10211260
>Quit making excuses. If you are smart enough to get into a stem program you are smart enough to finish it.
I started off in community college. I basically just showed up and passed. It's very different now that I'm in university.

[Anonymous No.10211277]

Even though I got a 74 on the final, I got curved to 118. EM is generally a GPA killer.
>>10211262
I'd imagine 400.

[Anonymous No.10211290]

>>10211277
My professor does not curve grades. He does give partial credit, but you only if you almost completely finish the problem.

[Anonymous No.10211294]

>>10211275
>>10211277
I got a B in em 1 and an A in em 2.

Just have to know when you can use symmetry to solve problems vs. When you have to do it the hard way with coloumbs law or biosavart.

My professor also liked to ask conceptual questions. Those were the hardest for me. I thought applied part was easier. I was a math major though, not physics so I approached it from a different view.

[Anonymous No.10211296]

>>10211294
Is em2 dynamics or magnetics? Our conceptual problems were wrapped with our calculation ones.

[Anonymous No.10211302]

>>10211247
I failed QM and Optics and had to retake those, not that big of a deal. You will probably do better than you think the second time. I got an A and a B after failing.

[Anonymous No.10211400]

>>10211296
We did statics and either chapter 4 or 5 in Griffiths I can't remember. Anyways, it was "magnetostatics" which you learn isn't really a thing in em2.

In em2 we used maxwell's equations to work on dynamics stuff as well as one of the later chapters in griffiths about potentials and fields.

For example, he asked as a question about variance of guage transformations before we really talked about it. He expected us to be able to solve it based on what we already knew from the first 8 chapters or whatever it was.

Point is, as a math student, I found a lot of parallels between techniques used to solve different problems. For a lot of griffiths problems, you can look at the info given and see what equations you can use that will let you simplify to 1 variable to solve for.

[Anonymous No.10211516]

>>10211247

400 level I’m assuming?
Write down and understand the big three vector analysis theorems: divergence theorem, greens theorem, and stokes theorem. Just from a pure maths perspective. Understand exactly what the theorems are actually saying about these relationships.

After you understand the mathematics, then understand how we apply these theorems in the physical situations presented in E&M.

Got a B in my 400 level E&M course that unfortunately didn’t have open book exams, solely because I had taken a vector calculus and PDE courses previously. No prior physics course helped me at all, it was just the maths.

Also, if you aren’t using Griffiths’ text, you’re fucking up.

[Anonymous No.10211631]

>>10211277
>his uni curves grades
Wow nice meme