Trouble with math and transfer

Hello everyone!

I’m new here. I’m trying to transfer to a UC for bio from a California community college, and math stands in my way. I’m really frustrated with it, I’ve been a college student since 04 or 05 and I feel like I’m trapped because of this one subject. I haven’t taken a math class (successfully) in 10+ years. I try to avoid them because calculus 1 (the level I’m at) just doesn’t make any sense to me and I end up falling behind until I must withdraw. I tried to go back to precalc this spring and it wasn’t any better, so I swapped the class for something that I am good at.

But anyway, I don’t want to give up but I don’t know what to do. 2 ideas I had were to take the entire math series ALL over again at my college. That’s 6-7 semesters, (potentially more if there are any more setbacks) to get through calculus 2. The second idea I had was saying screw it, I’m eligible to take calc 1 so I might as well. I would take that as the sole class for my semester, get a personal tutor every day of the week, go to every office hours opportunity, study constantly, etc. Assuming I’m able to comprehend it, that’s 2 semesters and a few thousand for the tutor.

So do I hit the reset button or go all in? Other suggestions are 110% welcome, and thank you for reading!

I think that it might be a waste of time for you do the entire math series again. You qualify to take Pre-Calc/Calc 1 so you obviously don’t need to take those other classes.

I can only speak from personal experience, but a good tutor can really make a difference in a class. I struggled a lot with economics but I had a tutor that saved me. Went from a D in the class to a final grade of an A. In my opinion, it is best to utilize a tutor.

Pre-Calc is a UC transferable course so you wouldn’t need to go as high as Calc 1 or Calc 2 in order to transfer if that’s all you’re looking for.

I wish that were true ccstudent! I think it is in the event that you are not a STEM major or something like that. I recently called UCLA after I found out about this the other day.

http://www.admission.ucla.edu/Prospect/Adm_tr/lsmajors/life_sci.htm

But I think I may just try to get a good tutor because I really don’t want to spend another 2+ years on math all over again.

I would recommend maybe sitting in one semester so that when you take Calc 1 for a grade, it’s not that bad.

Get a tutor, work on problems everyday. I tutor math at my college and I used to help students who asked me why negative times negative becomes positive, why we have to change the sign of an inequality if it is multiplied with a negative number, why we have to add the exponents when multiplying two powered numbers. Nothing wrong with asking these types of questions, and I actually dont know how to reason something that I have been taking as rules of thumb for years. However, i was able to answer a lot of their questions after attempting many different ways. But honestly, sometime instead of trying to find out why math works, because math is not your major, you can just figure out a way to cheat it. Memorize rules, study typical types of questions that will be on the tests. This is not the best way to study math, but if you need it to pass the class, try it.