In high school I took 14 AP classes. I was extremely hardworking.
My freshman year of college, I decided to take PHY 2048. I got a C in it. Then, for some reason I continued, thinking that PHY 2049 would be easier. I am expecting to get a C-. The immense failure I’ve experienced pushed me to change majors from Computer Science to Biomedical Sciences, which I think is actually a really good thing, since my new major is so much more interesting and fun. The failure has also forced me to make personality changes. Instead of being an overachiever, I am learning that I MUST take care of myself. I am learning about what I can handle and what my interests are, which is good.
I’m thankful that this failure has caused me to make lifestyle changes, leading me to a happier life, but I cannot shake the feeling that I am a huge idiot. I haven’t had a C since middle school. My problem with the PHY 2048/2049 sequence isn’t that I don’t study enough. It’s that I just DON’T GET IT. I am incapable of learning PHY 2048/2049 content. I cannot wrap my head around it. I cannot retain any of the knowledge. I used to study for hours and hours for this sequence, until I just gave up because my efforts did not translate to good grades. I feel like I haven’t learned anything.
How do I recover from such devastating failure?
P.S. The good news is that I can retake the lectures and keep the labs. When I retake the lectures, I can take easier versions: PHY 2053/2054. The Cs will be erased from my GPA. This will bring my GPA up from a 3.5 to a 4.0.
Sorry, but AP courses have nothing on college courses. Most schools don’t even count them for credit.
Most new college students can’t maintain the speed of college coursework.
To perform well, you need to:
go to office hours.
go to the GA’s and tutors on campus.
access the supplemental readings.
understand and do the labs,
form your study groups.
These courses are not supposed to let you slide through.
First of all, a C or two is not failure, all Fs and flunking out is failure, a specific type of failure to perform academically in college that may or may not translate to failure in life depending on other choices that the person makes. A 3.5 GPA is not an indication that you are an idiot. Time to reframe your thinking from negative all or nothing to more realistic, situational and changeable.
Some people, really smart people, struggle with physics. You recover by moving on if you don’t need the classes for your new major, or retaking these or the equivalent if you do. Also follow the @aunt bea suggestions, and @bopper pinned at the top of the College Life page.
In middle school you may have been the smartest kid. In HS you may have been a top 20 smartest kid. Now all those top smart kids are at your college…things are harder.
What you did to study before may not work any more
You may hae taken a class you were not prepared for. What is Physics 2048? each college has its own scheme
@“aunt bea” most schools do still give credit for AP. Some very selective ones do not or limit the amount you get. Almost every school below the tier #1 does give credit for 5s on the AP test, and the vast majority of those for scores below a 5. Not the point of your post, but I don’t want to send the wrong message.
@BrianBoiler True but I will also say that at D’s university students who planned to continue in math or science were urged not to use AP credits in these areas to start at higher level since HS APs often don’t cover as much material or in the proper depth to give you what you need to move on. In other words a 5 in AP bio might still not mean you’re ready to go straight into next level up from a college intro bio class.
Hard to tell from OP’s post but maybe he tried to skip entry level (since course number starts with 2)
@scmom12 I agree with your post, I just didn’t want to cause confusion by letting prospective students think APs are not accepted for credit at most schools.
My son did the same thing this original poster experienced.
My son passed out of his entire freshman year on AP credit. His first B of his life was obtained in the next level calculus class which was actually a 2-3 class sequence (the next two classes covered three classes in the normal progression) and he also labeled himself an idiot, failure, stupid, pick the degrading term. No amount of discussion could get him off this. His next semester he got 2 Bs, and the third he got 2 more. Now he is beginning to realize that studying to learn is more satisfying then studying to get a grade and his opinion of himself is much better. His fourth semester he was asked to TA for one of the classes he got a B in. He has been asked to be an undergraduate researcher on a really cool project this summer. He is also now getting As in all his classes, but to him it isn’t nearly as important as the fact that he is actually trying to learn, instead of get an A.
Not knowing what classes you are taking it is hard to comment on how you are doing. If you have gotten as far as special relativity or quantum physics then I am not surprised at all that you have run into trouble. These are very difficult classes. Regardless, anything that starts with a “2” is usually not a freshman year class. You might have jumped ahead too far.
Also, university physics at least in my experience requires a lot of calculus. How did you do in calculus and how far did you get? Sometimes students that jump ahead too quickly find that their math background is not strong enough. A very strong base in algebra and calculus will be needed for quite a few higher level classes in various STEM fields. If you have any weakness in these subjects you might need to fix this over the summer.
Also, the further you get through your studies, the more important it is to understand why things work the way that they do. You should not just memorize formulae. I actually recall several times in university math classes forgetting the formulae and having to re-derive them in the border of my exam sheet before solving the problems. As long as you understand the why this is possible.
University is going to be more difficult than high school. This is particularly true when you go to upper year classes.
Everyone’s going to bomb a class or two. Don’t let it discourage you. I bombed programming in college, and I’m a computer programmer by profession. Seriously, there’s no need to torture yourself again if you already have a 3.5 GPA. Just move on and be happy you don’t have to take those evil physics classes again
Getting a C doesn’t make you an idiot. That’s kind of offensive to every hard-working student who has ever gotten a C in college. I would like to hear what you got in your other classes. Seeing as your current GPA is 3.5, I am guessing the other grades aren’t C’s. You need to relax. You will probably get another C while in college, and you will live to tell the tale.
I am skeptical that this is a legitimate post, by the way. It’s full of hyperbole.
We had a very stressed sophomore STEM D talking to us on the phone last week. She’s taking (in addition to a couple of other classes this semester) physics/physics lab and bio/bio lab - never took physics (EVER) and hadn’t taken a pure bio course since 9th grade. We thought we were listening to the sadness of a kid worried about not passing her classes. Turns out she was upset because she probably wouldn’t be getting A’s in most of them. Clearly, our expectations for her and her expectations for herself were very misaligned. You are not dumb, but college is a very humbling experience for a lot of HS overachievers. Some subjects/classes/teachers are just confounding, and no amount of effort (given your time constraints with other classes and needing to sleep, etc.) will make them appreciably less so. At the end of the day, if you worked the hardest and smartest you could and still got a C, that’s the grade you earned. You aren’t not going to get a degree because you got a C.
Physics is hard. If you study a lot and still don’t get it, you need somebody to help you to achieve this next level of understanding. A good tutor can work wonders.
I think most of why AP’s are considered hard is because they tend to have a lot of assignments, and students with all or mostly-AP courseloads have to deal with piles of homework on a daily or near-daily basis. College courses don’t generally have lots of assignments; there’s less day-to-day pressure but papers and projects from different classes still often end up coinciding at various points in the semester. If you’re good at time management, you won’t have to stay up really late multiple times every week to get your work done. In contrast, if you have a lot of homework after getting home from a day at high school, students don’t have much of a choice in staying up late.
I’m pretty much in the same situation, mostly As in high school and took like 13 college courses at a CC( 49 credits 3.9gpa) now I am in at a university and am struggling just to keep Bs in some courses. Ok, could I have worked harder this year and got more As? Probably. But that isn’t what happened.
I just took a biology exam that I studied much harder than other people in the group I study with and don’t think I got an A. Or the chem exam where I went through the professors practice problems and all of the lecture slides, which was almost 200 slides. Felt I understood the material and did not finish the exam(C+)
Just need to manage your time better, find better ways to study and more efficient ways so you are not staying up so late. I know it’s annoying when you don’t understand the material, or understand it and screw up an exam, but you just need to keep moving forward with that you have. I know I still don’t do all of these things perfectly
In High School, it’s enough to just work hard. In college, you have to work hard AND work smart. Less time with more efficient study strategies can often be a lot more effective than just spending copious amounts of time memorizing things.
