<p>I am going to be a freshman at Vanderbilt this fall and I am having concerns over my selection for science and lab. I signed up for the Introduction to Astonomy class and night lab to fulfill my science requirement since I am not good at many sciences/do not have an interest and astronomy sounded like a fun and unusual class to take. I also however am not very good at math. I mean I took Calculus AB senior year in high school but I struggled to get through it. I was beginning to get concerns over these classes after Vanderbilt had a mother of a current student call my mom to answer her questions and one thing she told my mom was that astronomy involved math. I looked online at Weintraub's textbook and it appears that at least the Intro class, not sure about the lab, is more of a history (of our universe) book than involving much math. I was wondering if I am safe staying in astronomy, which I would prefer, or whether I should switch into Oceanography, along with the lab, which I have a lot less interest in but heard is easy.</p>
<p>Congrats on your enrollment Collier, I hope you are looking forward to joining Vanderbilt. I took Weintraub’s Introduction to Astronomy class last year and I highly recommend it. Heed my recommendation with caution because I am a physics/math major, so the course was a bit up my alley. However, I can assure you that as long as you do the readings, which are not at all unreasonable, and look over the homeworks, which are not even collected, you will do well in the class. A lot of the class consists of students who are like you, those who have interests elsewhere and just want to fulfill the math/science requirement. Even so, legitimately half of the class earned an A on the first test, and the performance on the others were similarly graded. The lecture portion was insanely interesting and I promise that even if you might not enjoy studying the night before a test, you’ll be glad you have the knowledge after the course is over. I don’t know if I could necessarily say the same for Oceanography. I can’t comment much about the lab portion, since I only took the lecture, but I have a friend who is an economics major and took the lab last year. He practically failed out of calculus but still earned an A pretty easily in the lab and lecture portions of the class so I would not worry too much about your performance. Finally, Weintraub is an amazing teacher; he is one of the huge reasons I decided to attend Vanderbilt. Though the class normally has around eighty students in attendance, he never fails to know every one of them and makes an effort to help everyone individually. The math is extremely simple; you seriously only need to know how to multiply, divide, add, and subtract. Good luck in your first year at Vanderbilt.</p>
<p>Thanks so much! I feel a lot better and I think I will stay in astronomy.</p>