Time flies by especially when having a good time.
Dear reader, this semester was the fastest I have ever experienced well, it is the US, and life in general is fast. I want to take you through my Journey specifically in Calculus 2 and a little bit of Calculus 1, and how there is integration of material with my other classes. Get some popcorn because you’re in for a good read. If you read my reflection for last semester you know that I am part of a program called SMART where we integrate our studies in Chem-Bio-Math. For those who are new, here is the link, just tracking my personal growth, let me go read it as well and I will continue with telling you about my Spring Semester:)
If you are like me and had gone to read last semester’s reflections, welcome back! However, a lot of things have changed since then. I took a high school program called International Baccalaureate(IB) and came to college with high school credits so I did not have to continue with the Bio-Chem part of SMART anymore. Instead, I took an Introduction to Programming class CMSC 105. In Calculus we had two labs that were all done using programming language and it was very exciting seeing all the things I was learning in CMSC in practice. Here is one of the labs, Lab7 where we were modeling Enzyme Kinetics. We looked at how differential equations give us a natural way to describe chemical phenomena. It was a continuation of the Bio-Chem lab which I did not do hence I used one of my classmates’ data. This Lab was drawing into one of our learning objectives of the semester Learning Target 11 “I can express real-world situations as differential equations, and interpret differential equations in a biological context.” The first line of the code was “import tellurium as te” Seeing this line with my acquired programming knowledge, I could deduce that Tellurium is not an inbuilt class for the Python language hence the need to import. My inquisitive mindset made me research what Tellurium is. According to the National Institute of Health (NIH), Tellurium is a Python-based computational platform for systems biology modeling and simulation. It provides tools for modeling biochemical networks, simulating their behavior, and analyzing the results. By importing it as “te,” users can access its functionality using the abbreviated name “te” in their code, making it more concise and readable. On top of that, there was string concatenation, the example below from the code where [E] was concatenated with [S]. This directly links with the material we were learning in CMSC
R1: E+S -> ES; kf*E*S
R2: ES -> E+S; kb*ES
R3: ES -> E+P; r*ES
In hindsight, Calculus 1 and 2 was an easy ride, and most of it is because of Dr Toress’s way of teaching. As I highlighted in last Semester’s reflection, the class is structured in such a way that you are present the whole time. You can not zone out!! As highlighted at the bottom of the
course outline, there is always something to do every day for the class. This schedule worked really well with me in Calculus 1 because I had 4 classes, however, this Semester I took Calculus 2 alongside 4 other classes. The pain was that one of those courses was Organic Chemistry +Lab. To be honest, it was a lot of weight to carry. Because I had taken Calculus 1 I knew that if I fell behind, I would make my workload double in this class. Balancing time in these classes was difficult, I watched my confidence deeming across all my classes. I felt dumb, and I cried. My
grades however did not reflect any of this because I was present all the time in class, and I did my post-class assignments. I work best in teams, and I would have loved to get a study partner from Calculus 2 and another one from Organic 1. Doing work with a friend, explaining my understanding to them and vice versa consolidates the class material and can increase both of us’s understanding. There is this quote that I like I forgot who wrote it, it says ‘without friends everything is a cause of mental breakdown.’ Do not get me wrong, I am not a loner, my friends just do not have the same interest as me so we barely have classes in common. How did I solve the issue? I quit my job at the Phonathon that was taking most of my time. I replaced it with being a Calculus 1 tutor for the Quantitative Research Center, which gave me more time to study. I know that I am a night person so I shifted my bedtime to 1:30am giving me more time to dedicate to my grades. I also shortened the night calls with my boyfriend. I also took a weekend to Pittsburg and told God all my worries for the semester which rejuvenated my energy and changed my perspective, it helped me enjoy the work instead of stressing through it. I think I have talked too much, but in a nutshell, my challenge this semester was time management and not a specific concept.
A constant annoying trait that I see with A students is the inability to ask for help or admitting that they are wrong. I understand. The University of Richmond’s acceptance rate is 24.4% so it has the world’s brightest brains. We come from schools where we were the best and most people want to maintain that. Enough with the storytelling I just wanted to debrief you on the UR demographics.
Since Calculus 1, I was partnered with Dulce, and we would take
Team Quizzes together. We work really well keeping each other accountable. We had 7 team quizzes this semester and we only failed two of them. This is way better than our performance in Fall because this time around we actually prepared and collaborated in coming up with the answers.
Something new I learned this semester is that Maths is a language that Mathematicians use to communicate. Do not haphazardly throw in numbers on a paper and expect the other person to understand. Dr Toress made us revisit some of the work we had done earlier, and we were supposed to read it and see how long it would take to fully understand what was happening. Yes, even we could not understand what we had written. We started learning to communicate our ideas effectively, and coherently. My growth is evidenced
here.
You’ve made it to the end of this post:) Thank you I hope you’ve learnt something and feel free to leave any comments.
