/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.7013504]

Does everybody forget the stuff they did in previous university classes? I'm in my final term and I can't remember anything relating to solving ordinary differential equations or frankly anything in most courses.

[Anonymous No.7013601]

my 400 level physics classes keep referencing some of the 200 ones (like the intro babby half-semester thermo or quantum classes) and literally nobody remembers shit from them

[Anonymous No.7013613]

Maybe you don't remember all the details, but you have experience using them and could, if a problem needed them, quickly refresh yourself and solve things.

You're not expected to remember all of your college content.

[Anonymous No.7013619]

You forget stuff that you don't use, but if you ever need it you can find that it's pretty easy to go re-read that chapter (or an article on wikipedia), try a few problems, and get it almost right away.

[Anonymous No.7013625]

aww, the flaw in education systems everywhere, people passing their classes to just understand enough to get the "grades". It's something that challenges me too, I am pretty sure that unless we study often and invest ourselves into the subject deeply, we will never forget anything, maybe.

[Anonymous No.7013626]

>>7013504

Just my personal experience.

But I find many job situations where I go back to uni and grad school course material.

I do recall enough of previously learned concepts. Then, know what to look up as reference.

[Anonymous No.7013636]

>>7013625

Depends on how you learned, too.

I mostly learned by deriving the concepts from first principles. So, I can re-create them on the fly for applied use, if necessary.

[Anonymous No.7013641]

You just didn't practice them enough. If you practiced them more, eventually it'd be like riding a bike.

[Anonymous No.7013719]

What I would do is study as much of a subject as I could prior to going into it. This makes going into the class a whole lot easier. Since you have experience working the problems out, it's a mere refresher.

Sadly though, the less you use the information in front of you, the less you retain it.

I can't remember shit from my 200 level thermo classes, but I know a shitload about orbital mechanics. Mainly because I'm always using them when playing KSP.

An even better example was when I first went to college after being away from school for two years. Algebra concepts were completely lost on me, was like

>Nigga what?

[Anonymous No.7013738]

This is somewhat of a problem. Understanding the underlying principles and remembering the logic that was used to derive the theorems helps, because that means that you need to remember less in total. A lot of practice obviously helps as well.
However I feel that many of the less used parts of previous courses are too easy to forget over the years. I address it with two methods:

Whenever I'm studying an advanced course and I find that I need to use a concept/method from a previous one I make sure that I understand it fully as well as the theory behind it, I go over as much material in the subject as practically possible without taking too much time. When I do this, if time permits I choose a couple of the more esoteric parts of the previous course to go over as well This means I am touching base with concepts more often than I would otherwise so that each time I go back to a subject of some course it's easier, not harder. Usually.

The second method is to teach courses I've passed, either as a side job. Alternatively helping students who are currently taking the course with the problems that make them struggle.
Granted you have to had understood the course well when you took it yourself to be on a sufficient level of understanding to do this, but it's extremely effective.

If you're studying physics/(some types) of engineering many of the math courses are only used by the tools they provide, if you're not touching the more complex problems and the theory for years I can't see how you would remember it well enough.
While I agree to previous posters in this thread that even so going over the material even after years works somewhat well, you're still losing the intuition. What's worse, I believe, sometimes you won't always realize which concepts you forgot that can be used to solve the problem at hand.

If other people have better/other methods to help with this issue I would be happy to hear them.

[Anonymous No.7013898]

>About to start masters in mathematics
>cant remember a single thing from undergrad
Well I'm fucked

[Anonymous No.7014172]

>>7013504
read some of the content on supermemo