<p>Relax. A- is a good grade. Unless you really feel like you didn’t understand the material in your physics classes, I wouldn’t worry about your grades. If you know you are going to be a physics major and focus more on physics classes, you can probably boost yourself to get As or at the very least, keep getting A-s, which is not that bad.</p>
<p>Sort of a tangent:
I think that the fact that physics and engineering physics have the reputation for being the hardest is stupid. Other majors are “hard” too. It all depends on how you define “hard.” I think what most people are thinking when they say physics is hard is that if you take someone who is not a physics major (ie an engineer) and put them in a physics class, they might have difficultly. On the contrary, if you put a physics major in a non-physics class (ie engineering), they would have a better chance of succeeding than that other student.</p>
<p>That is a terrible way of thinking about it, yet I think it’s what most people mean when they are talking about the difficulty of a major. You don’t just choose a major on what you think is hard. You choose it based on what you like.</p>
<p>Most people in these majors really like physics for some innate reason, and as a result, they show dedication to physics classes and do well.
End tangent.</p>
<p>If you want to do physics (not engineering physics) and go to grad school, you should switch to the honors track. Roughly 75% of all physics majors — if not more — take the honors sequence and even more have at least tried it before dropping to the regular sequence. If you do the regular track and get in to a top grad school, you would be an outlier. Most of the time, only people from the honors sequence get into top grad schools. They really want to see that you pushed yourself to take the harder classes that were set up for physics majors. You don’t need the best grades in these classes (though, that would help…) since research experience as an undergrad plays a huge role (50+%) in grad school admissions. I wouldn’t worry about not starting with the honors sequence, since your grades in upper level classes matter more than how you did in your freshman year. It helps to have taken the honors intro sequence because theoretically, it’s designed to prepare you for those upper classes better than the regular sequence which is geared toward engineers, not physics majors. If you want to do pure physics, I would at least give PHYS 2218 a try. If you find yourself struggling at first, you can switch back to 2214. Hardly anything from 2217 is used in 2218, so don’t worry about the pre-req at all. The one disadvantage you will have is that 2218 is nearly all physics majors, so you might not know anyone. My advice would be to find a group of friends in the class who are physics majors to do problem sets with. This is really important. When I was in 2218, I always did problem sets with a good group of friends (as with all of the physics classes that I have taken) and I don’t think I could have done well without them and the idea of working in groups. Specifically, if Eun-ah Kim is teaching it, she will give you lecture notes before each class. At the very least, skim them before class and bring either a hard copy or have them on your laptop or phone in class to refer to. That way, you always know what she is talking about.</p>
<p>If you want to do engineering physics, the honors sequence is not as stressed. I think only ~40-50% of EP majors take the honors sequence. Like physics, it’s designed to better prepare you for the upper level classes. Though unlike physics, everyone in EP takes the same core upper level classes. So for EP, I wouldn’t be too worried about not taking the honors sequence. For EP, I would say it’s at your discretion of whether you want to take 2218. In my opinion (and the opinion of a lot of my physics major friends), 2214/2218 is not as important as Mechanics or E&M. Those are the two fundamental areas in intro physics. 2214/2218 is supplementary material.</p>
<p>If you have any other questions, feel free to ask.</p>