PiledriverWalz wrote: ↑28 Jun 2022 17:01
Wow this is really cool ! Too bad you didn't keep going with the studies because physics is really interesting !
I'll be honest with you. I was ambivalent about going to university in the first place. I felt I wasn't ready yet,
and wasn't sure which degree, exactly, I wanted to do. I visited a few universities and attended interviews,
but withdrew my application. I needed more time to think things through.
The problem I had, though, was that I was living as an unregistered occupant at my father's place and,
obviously, he didn't want the owners of the property to find out that I was staying there. So he insisted
that I reinstate my application and go to university. There were many places available on physics courses
in some universities because not many people wanted to study physics. So I made a rash decision and
chose a theoretical physics degree.
So, that was that. I went to university - in effect - to have a place to live!
(And, to be even more honest, I actually hated university/student life, anyway.)
All the physics courses were interesting (some more than others), but the theoretical physics degree course
itself was just impossible, which was why quite a few of us just got fed up by the end of the first year.
The entire course structure must've been designed by academics who were either completely insane or
completely out of touch about what knowledge and skills students have when they start these courses.
What I didn't fully realise before signing up for the course was that it was actually 20 per cent computer
programming assessed. We were expected to learn - in our first year alone - both the Pascal and Fortran
programming languages - and complete assignments on those topics. And this was in the early 1990s before
the 'Windows' operating system was introduced, so we all had to learn MS-DOS in addition to all that.
Hardly fair when (a) you've never touched a computer before in your life before university, (b) this
component of the course started just weeks away from the end-of-year exams, and (c) even my
own personal course tutor had no clue about computer programming (I once went to see him in his
office about this, and he just said : "All I know is how to send e-mail"(!)
) And he was a very intelligent
guy, BTW, who had written papers on black holes and on other weird mathematical physics topics.
And the computing stuff was in addition to the physics assignments, mathematical methods assignments,
statistics assignments, and experimental physics lab reports we had to hand in on a regular basis. Oh, and
of course there was exam revision as well. No, I wasn't expecting the course to be 'easy'. I mean, it was
a university degree course in physics. But it was hardly fair.
So, I later decided to take on more courses in mathematics and, by the end of my studies, I got an undergraduate
qualification in mathematics and just left it at that.