I have a can-tolerate / hate relationship with math.
You see, as of right now I’m an economics major. I love my economics classes and I find research in economics to be fascinating. I’m planning on pursuing graduate school for economics, but there’s one subject standing in my way: math.
Math doesn’t come easily to me. Therefore, on a good day I can tolerate it, and on a bad day I hate it. However, the reason I hate math isn’t the actual subject, but the difficulty I have understanding the material. I eventually understand what my professors are talking about, but it doesn’t come as easily as, say, sociology, political science, or even some of my finance classes.
The reason I’m posting this here is to ask people that are majoring in mathematics: does math come easily to you, or do you still have to work at it?
When I took introductory calculus, the concepts came to me faster than it did for the average student in the class. There was still multiple situations that arose in which I became confused and had to go to tutoring and office hours. As a result, that course was not a blow off class but was still a course I felt much more favorable in than, say for example, the average class in the core curriculum. Now I am in my last semester of my math degree and I can say that even though math is my biggest strength, I still have had to go through math classes in which I felt lost repeatedly and had to go to office hours a lot. The upper level math courses typically have students who are great at math here (lots of CS/Physics/Math students as well as engineering majors) and still, very few of them breeze through all of their math classes. There’s always the one or two people that seem to already know the entire lesson plan before class and miraculously answer every question in class but those people aren’t reflective of the rest of the class.
Most people (even math majors) have to work at math. I’ve finished most of an applied math major, and I’ve probably worked harder in my math classes than my other classes (with the exception of some computer science classes). I recommend that you keep studying math - it’s an important subject, and it’s very useful for economics.
Depends on the subject. There are several areas of math. Real Analysis came easier to me than Pre-Calculus. Partial Differential Equations came easier to me than Ordinary Differential Equations.
The only class I had to work EXTREMELY hard for was Chemistry. I do not know what it is about chemistry, but I am not good at it at all it seems.