This might be an odd question? perspective?
At my university, it’s not required to take Cal1+ for our CS program (You can take matrices/stats/discrete math instead). I decided to challenge myself + for fun and took Cal1 and passed, then Cal2…and passed. Basically, I went from having intermediate algebra to cal3 and today I’m here on what started out as challenging and fun…to Cal3 for next semester. (I suck at math, unsure how I made it this far but I’m told I can’t be that bad because I made it this far)
While I understand that Cal3 will open up a lot of other majors/options for me, I can’t feel but think about my GPA/Time spent. There’s a lot of things I’ve been thinking about such as my scholarship expectations or whether or not I should be taking classes that are irrelevant to my major (time) etc. But I’m also not the kind of student that glorifies the GPA system. I personally think life experiences/wisdom/exploring/challenging myself is much more important. I’ve been taking classes that I think will be useful and are interesting to me and I really hate the idea of letting the GPA determine what I can and cannot do.
Last semester, I took some rigorous classes like Data Structure and Algorithms in combination with Cal2 and this was a stressful semester. I learned a lot of interesting concepts and knowledge from these classes but I’m starting to rethink/doubt this whole challenging and fun journey I went on.
So the question is, for a junior, is it worth it for the sake of learning it? I could simply stop here and just have easy mode until graduation but why? For some reason struggling can be fun, it helps me understand why learning is so important. On the other hand, it’s time-consuming and hard. Yes, it’s hard for me to learn all this new stuff.
But…I feel like I already know the answer to my own question. I should just take Cal3+Physis+ because it’s something I want to do. Currently, I teach Python at a public school through a program run through our department chair…it’s all been fun but I just don’t know if I am making good decisions. Should I really be taking the Cal/Psychics series for fun?
What opinions do you guys have?
