I just spent the last four years of my life studying physics. Like most people, I wanted my choice of degree to be as informed as possible, so I did plenty of research beforehand. But ultimately I had no idea what to expect. Though I’ve found the last four years brilliant and fascinating and met some great people, there’s a lot I know now that I wish I’d known before I started. These things would have made my time at university less stressful, resulted in higher marks, and ultimately given me a better understanding of the subject which I’ve ‘mastered’ in exchange for a considerable amount of debt. This is not necessarily to be read as advice, but rather things which I believe I personally would have benefited from reading four years ago. Some stuff will be relevant to other sciences, or other STEM subjects, some perhaps relevant to any university degree, and some of it may just be particular to me. But who knows, maybe it’ll help someone.
1. It is always better to underestimate your intelligence than overestimate
Most of us aren’t as smart as we think we are, and I think this applies especially to new undergraduates, for most of whom their greatest intellectual challenge thus far has been to run the gauntlet of the same secondary education system that everyone else starting university has successfully run too. The key difference between a degree and an A-level is that an A-level is constructed so that anyone is capable of passing. A well-structured degree programme will be made so that anyone who passes university admission should be capable of passing. The upshot of this is that you need to revise your ideas of what you’re capable of. Realistically this means a 2.1 (my experiences are with the UK system — a 2.1 is the second highest degree band, equivalent to around a 3.3 or higher GPA under the US system), but the amount of work required to achieve what is increasingly (and unfairly) considered mediocrity will be vastly different to what you have been used to so far. Which brings me to my second point —
2. Be wary of advice from anyone who tells you that doing their A-levels was the hardest they ever had to work
I’m not going to beat around the bush on this one. A physics degree is simply harder than most other degrees. You will have to put in more hours than for most other subjects, and there will be much temple-rubbing and frustration. Furthermore, the time investment needed to grasp each new concept will vary widely from person to person. You’ll find that some people ‘just get’ certain things while you’re left in the dark. My own experiences of this have been, in the worst cases, almost believing everyone else on my course to be involved in some kind of bizarre conspiracy to pretend a concept makes sense when it actually doesn’t. It does average out to some extent — you’ll ‘just get’ some concepts faster than your peers about as many times as the reverse — but there will be those who are just smarter than you. Don’t despair. Physics is a hard subject, and do not allow the apparent ease with which some of your peers complete problem sheets fool you. They are either very smart, working very hard, or, most likely, both. And while we’re on the subject of problem sheets,
3. Problem sheets aren’t just a way of learning, or even the best way — they’re the ONLY way
This one’s very straightforward, but very particular to mathematical subjects. The factor which correlated most closely with the mark I got in each module was the number of problems I’d attempted, and of those how many I’d managed to do myself without the solutions. Some, but (disappointingly) not all, lecturers will offer to mark and give feedback. Use this. Hand things in when you’re supposed to. You’ll find the lack of people capable of doing problem sheets before the deadlines imposed by lecturers mean your lecturer will have plenty of time to mark you and give you detailled feedback. This is such a brilliant resource, and there’s a reason why those who take advantage of it tend to do so much better. Feedback is an important part of learning, and many people (lecturers included) loose sight of this due to the one-directional setup of most modern university teaching. So my next point is
4. Unless you’ve been visibly asleep, there’s no shame in asking a lecturer to repeat or clarify something
Something which is unique to mathematical degrees is the number of times a plucky undergraduate student following intently will pick up on a mathematical error made by the lecturer and demand they correct it. In other settings this is unthinkable — an esteemed professor being corrected in front of a packed lecture theatre by a lowly undergraduate? But it should and does happen. It’s almost like a live peer review. Or as one of my lecturers once put it, teaching undergraduates physics is our (as in, the scientific community’s) way of making sure there’s nothing really stupid in our reasoning. Overwhelmingly, when lectures at my university were interrupted, it was to point out algebraic errors, and while these interjections are important, they all have the common factor that someone is making themselves look smarter than all their peers, and in general physics students need little encouragement when such an opportunity arises. On the other hand, asking a lecturer to slow down or clarify is much rarer. This impulse was drilled out of me at school when interruptions were considered rude and indicative of not paying enough attention. But we’re all adults now. If something was difficult or unclear for you, it was probably also difficult or unclear for someone else. I’ve been in lectures where as many as 100 student have nodded along in agreement only to leave the theatre asking each other “what the f*ck was that about?”. So ask.
5. Never flip the page when working out problems
The bane of the life of every student doing mathematical problem sheets is when you’re halfway through some complicated algebra and you need to turn the page. Do you try to copy out the last line onto the next side, or flip the page furiously every few seconds to remember what you had before? For someone with a poor memory, such as myself, I lost many a minus sign or factor of root 2 in the edge between the two sides of a sheet of paper. But, after four years of driving myself bloody mad with this problem, I came up with a solution so simple I was actually furious that no one had told me about this before. The algorithm is simple: write on the side of paper. Then, if the last page you used is blank on one side, write on that side. Otherwise, start a new page. Repeat ad nausium. (Also, remember to number your pages). This way you never have to turn over a page to continue writing, you use all of the available sides of paper, and your pages retain ordering. If you were to compile the loose sheets into a book, you would find that when you opened the first to pages you would see sides [1|2], and then turning over you’d see [4|3], and then [5|6], and so on, so that you always see two sides which continue from one another. This may seem silly, but if I’d know this four years ago it would have made long sessions writing out algebra considerably less unpleasant.
So, that’s all I can think about for now. Any additions from your own experiences are welcome.
