<p>This semester, I have a very low B in chemistry. All of my other classes are As. I am afraid that if I do not do well enough on the final I'll drop to a C in chemistry.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, I absolutely love chemistry and find it fascinating. I feel like I am understanding most of the material and my low grade is more a result of making silly mathematical errors / not spending enough time on labs. At this point and time I want to study something like chemical engineering, though, but I feel that this low grade in chemistry would be telltale of things to come. I have decided to not take AP Chemistry next year (I am doing AP Bio & AP Physics) for the sake of my GPA.</p>
<p>Do you or anyone you know have experiences with someone who performed badly in a subject but found it as a passion later on? I feel the reasons I am not doing well (procrastinating with lab write-ups, not studying enough, mathematical errors, etc.) can be easily solved, and I sure hope that is the case.</p>
<p>Silly errors in calculations can and will make your grade go down (I do it all the time) but that does not mean that you don’t understand the material. You said yourself that the grade issue can be easily solved, so take the steps to solve the problems. If you find it fascinating, I definitely think that that is one of the first steps to being successful. </p>
<p>I have a similar story. Freshman year, I took Honors Comp Sci at school. For the whole year, I struggled with the class and only managed to do well because a classmate was helping me all the time in that class. After the course was over, I swore I wouldn’t take another computer course again. Then comes my senior year, and I have a blank spot in my schedule. I could either take an online class or an extra english class, and there was no way in hell that I was going to take on another english class. So I looked into the AP science course offerings online, and thought that I wanted to take AP Human Geography, because there was I didn’t want to take AP Comp Sci (the alternative). After some prodding from my parents, I signed up for Comp Sci. I wound up understanding it much better and did better in this class than I did in my freshman class. </p>
<p>So basically, you can struggle in a class, but I believe that if you re-visit it in the future, your perspective on the subject may change =)</p>
<p>I feel you because I LOVE chemistry, but I’m not super talented. I remember in my sophomore and freshmen years I could not grasp the dimensional analysis and the whole balancing equation crap and really struggled with that in chem honors. I really enjoyed the course and wanted to see what I can do. </p>
<p>I have a bad habit of taking on stuff that 8/10 I will have trouble with. So I went on ahead and took AP chemistry my junior year and had lots of fun but worked my little tail off! Overall, I ended with a B in that class and my bad habit took the wheel once again: and decided to declare forensic chemistry as my major lol. </p>
<p>The moral of the story is do what you love and the rest will follow. When you do something you love, the hard work comes naturally.</p>
<p>The most important thing is that you understand it and are passionate about it.
Your silly mistakes and stuff are really just going to be practice and focus.
You’re going to be fine, as long as you pony up and focus more :)</p>
<p>Yeah, I only started understanding dimensional analysis at the beginning of second semester… I sort of was able to “think” through it beforehand, but stoichiometry kind of needs that stuff laid out (at least for me).</p>