Any physics majors feel too dumb to be majoring in physics?

[mariexotoni]

I am so discouraged right now.
In calc2 I must have like a C+ average. And I work stupidly hard and still don't obtain what I thought I could get. I understand so much of the theory though, because the math department sort of treats everyone like they're math majors and that they need to know everything.

Physics 2 is quite the opposite. I have an A. I know next to nothing. I hardly study. I was reviewing earlier today and learned how little I know. I was doing some halliday textbook problems (the problems difficulties were one and two dots) and i spent like three hours on only a handful of problems, not being able to solve any completely by myself. (had to look up help on the internet). and i read the chapter too!I feel like I try so hard. I know a lot of my professors said they worked hard to get through problems, but they couldn't have worked this hard.

Just feel like I have everything working against me. I'm stupid. A girl. But I love physics, and it breaks my heart thinking I might have to change my major when I don't want to..

what do i do? do i just work on everything during the summer? .. :(

 

[neyzenyelda]

I don't have such problems. I had a BS degree back in 1988. later I was an MS student and teaching assistant but gave up them both because university was very stressful for me.
now I am 49 and I study physics in a self-thaught manner. no exam, no grade, no stress, great pleasure.
I am working on general relativity and quantum field theory.

 

[ThinkToday]

I am so discouraged right now.
Just feel like I have everything working against me. I'm stupid. A girl. But I love physics, and it breaks my heart thinking I might have to change my major when I don't want to..

what do i do? do i just work on everything during the summer? .. :(

Excuse me! I'm not a girl, and I think that's offensive.

First things first. If you’re getting a "C+" in Calc you need time with a tutor to work out the area(s) you're having issues with. Calc requires you to have a good foundation in the prior math courses. It' possible your calc grade reflects inadequate prep for the course. Hence, get a tutor or your teacher to figure out what's happening. If you're getting an "A" in physics and know nothing, you may have a teacher issue or misinterpreting assumed progression. Your grade should reflect what you know. I suggest you sit down with the physics teacher and show them the textbook work you are having problems doing. You may find out the teacher isn't to that material yet or some other reason.

Questions will seldom get answered before they are asked. So ask.

Hang in there.

 

[mathsciguy]

I think this usually happens to every physics majors, or math majors, or anyone who's serious about what they're studying. I myself would get this every once in a while, and I observed that some of my peers would talk or at least it's implied that they think might not have the aptitude to do physics; these even come from the students who do quite well relative to the class.

The best you can do is to buckle up, continue studying and get better grades, that is, if you still plan on majoring in physics.

 

[S.N.]

This happens to most people in math or physics at some point. There will always be stellar students out there but most of us go through this. I got a C in calc 2 and now I have a math degree. Depending on your school sometimes calc 2 is a 'weed out' course where they really are trying to put pressure on you and doing poorly doesn't necessarily mean you're "bad at math." It will mess you up though if you don't take calc 3 seriously. Just keep focused and don't let it get you down. You passed the course, move on.

 

[some_letters]

I feel you. A little pressed for time right now, I'll report back to you later tonight on exactly how I feel. One of the main things eating at me is that I think i am not creative enough for physics/math. I can solve the problems and, after enough practice, incorporate clever techniques into my toolbox but I feel like it won't be enough when it comes to higher level classes. Do you also feel like this?

 

[mariexotoni]

Thats exactly what I was thinking. I really feel you have to be creative picking and choosing what formulas are going to work and realizing there's other crap you have to throw in there too

 

[mariexotoni]

I'm very nervous about quantum mechanics, modern physics, etc

 

[lisab]

I only felt too dumb to major in physics...oh, maybe every single day I was a student. I still can't believe I actually finished !

Stick with it. It doesn't get easier, but it does get really really interesting!

 

[R.P.F.]

I feel like I try so hard. I know a lot of my professors said they worked hard to get through problems, but they couldn't have worked this hard.

I think you totally underestimated how hard people try.

Just feel like I have everything working against me. I'm stupid. A girl. But I love physics, and it breaks my heart thinking I might have to change my major when I don't want to..

Blaming your gender is the last thing you should do.

what do i do? do i just work on everything during the summer? .. :(

Yes.
Good luck.

 

[EWH]

Maybe Halliday has the wrong presentation and problems for you. It generally gets mediocre reviews on Amazon - 12 of 23 are 3 star or lower.

I had huge problems with calculus, not with the intuitive aspects but the lack of physical application / motivation for so many of the problems. The problems seemed to usually be just empty symbol-shuffling with no connection to any plausible situation. I am told some people (math major "naturals") can limit the amount of disconnected facts they need to cram into their head by remembering the steps of the derivation and re-deriving as they go, but it seldom works for me.

I find the purely symbolic, unvisualizable "Bourbaki virus" approach to be a huge impediment in most math literature. I have a sneaking suspicion that these mathematicians go to great pains to erase the method that they actually used to arrive at their conclusions and substitute more "elegant" or "rigorous" but less intuitive proofs. Also math seems to have a zillion dialects which represent the same or similar things, and I suspect these may largely be to keep potential competition and unwashed undergraduates off the bull-mathematicians' academic turf.

There are lots of different approaches to any given math/physics problem, you need to find ones that work for you. For me I like the unified approach of Geometric Algebra (Hestenes, Dorst, Cambridge group) which is concise, mostly visualizable and can do everything from relativity to QM to group theory and beyond without so much tedious mucking about with tensors and matrices. I also like finding analogous problems and using them as models for things I don't understand. For instance the complex matrices in AC electrical circuit analysis are very close to the math in QM, and the optics of media with continuously variable refractive indexes gets you most of the way through general relativity (no frame-dragging, but it beats trying to imagine curved 4-D spaces).

 

[mathwonk]

yes we all do, indeed anyone who does not feel such insecurities is probably in denial.

 

[some_letters]

yes we all do, indeed anyone who does not feel such insecurities is probably in denial.

are you sure you always have? Think back to introductory physics and calculus courses. Were you understanding most of what was taught? In my case, I can implement techniques after learning them but am left with little working understanding of what I just learned. It works just fine for now but I'm afraid that eventually, my luck will run out despite my interest and fervent effort to keep it going. Creativity isn't in me. Should I look elsewhere?

I can follow a formula, but am hard-pressed to diverge from it and apply other knowledge that I know.

 

[twofish-quant]

I feel like I try so hard. I know a lot of my professors said they worked hard to get through problems, but they couldn't have worked this hard.

Yeah they did. The way the system works is that you always end up working hard and feeling stupid, because if you aren't working hard and if you don't feel stupid, then the material is too easy, and the system makes you work harder.

Part of surviving physics is getting used to feeling stupid. I'm so used to feeling stupid at this point that it doesn't bother me too much.

Just feel like I have everything working against me. I'm stupid. A girl.

1) If you feel smart, then it means that you aren't challenging yourself enough.

2) One advantage that men have is that it's more socially acceptable for men to do stupid things and to aggressively put through themselves into stupid situations. (Think of the TV series Jackass). Also, a lot of physics tends to be alpha-male stuff in the sense that you have what is the equivalent of a bar-fight only with equations. It's more socially acceptable for men to punch each other in the face, and much of physics involves doing that with equations.

I do know of women that have figured out how do deal with this, and it's probably a good idea if you find the local "old girls network".

what do i do? do i just work on everything during the summer? .. :(

1) Most important thing is to realize that you aren't alone and what you are going through is pretty standard and normal (google for the impostor syndrome)

2) Feel good about yourself when you get something done. If you get an A, then you got an A. Feel good about getting the A rather than question yourself.

3) Realize that as you get deeper into physics, you will feel more and more stupid. I can honestly say that I am more confused about physics now that I was when I was a college freshman, because I know more things to be confused about. You will feel stupid, the trick is getting used to feeling stupid.

 

[twofish-quant]

are you sure you always have? Think back to introductory physics and calculus courses. Were you understanding most of what was taught?

I felt as if I as treading water.

I remember very well the feeling that I had in Introductory Calculus, because one way that I got through it was to remember *exactly* what I felt at a specific moment, and then promise myself is that if I got through it, they I'd help whoever is ends up there next. Which is why I'm here now.

Writing diaries, short stories, and poetry is useful for this. The other things that are useful is to read biographies. You'll find out that Einstein had his bad days. The other very useful thing to do is to find a social group. Feeling stupid and insecure becomes a lot better when you are with a group of people that are feeling the same thing.

The *psychology* of getting through physics is just as important, perhaps more important than getting the equations right.

In my case, I can implement techniques after learning them but am left with little working understanding of what I just learned. It works just fine for now but I'm afraid that eventually, my luck will run out despite my interest and fervent effort to keep it going. Creativity isn't in me. Should I look elsewhere?

The point of intro physics classes isn''t to teach anything creative. Try this. Write a paragraph. Now write a paragraph but think about every letter as you are writing it. You will find that you'll be thinking too much about each letter to think about the paragraph.

OK, physics works the same way. There are some basic grammar and techniques that you have to learn, and if you have to think about each equation, then you'll never be able to think about doing something new. The point of intro physics is to have you repeat the techniques so that you can apply them without having to think about them.

You can get the creative stuff with undergraduate research, and even then you'll find that the creative moments are few and far between.

I can follow a formula, but am hard-pressed to diverge from it and apply other knowledge that I know.

Once it becomes second nature, then it will be easier. Also a lot of creativity involves applying things to "weird situations." For example, once you know PDE's left and right, you might find it in an unexpected context.

 

[Lavabug]

I feel the same way, and so do the top few students in my class. I'm starting to believe that being made to feel stupid continually by arrogant & unhelpful professors is part of the "training" to do some serious intellectual gruntwork on one's own. So worry more about learning and understanding what you're doing (hopefully, enjoying it along the way) and remember that no one was born knowing what they need to know to get through a QM course.

Take the blows to your intellectual self-esteem on the chin with a good sense of humor and just keep studying. There's nothing that a solid, several month long string of proper study habits can't solve.

 

[chill_factor]

I found most of my professors to be nice. I've felt really dumb even in "easy" classes if I had a bad professor and confident even in "hard" classes if I had a nice one.

I've thought about the "niceness" of professors correlated to their field of study. The best teachers I've had was an astrophysicist and a condensed matter experimenter. The worst teachers I've had were both particle physics theorists.

 

[Lavabug]

I'm not so concerned with profs being good at explaining things verbally, as long as they make an effort. I do have a problem with profs that spend too much time on the trivial basics, then make up a final exam that every single student fails, then insult students in exam revisions. (ie: 1 or 2 problems, 100% of the grade that are four standard deviations higher in difficulty than any problem solved in-class or in the bibliography, often involving tricks that only the prof would know as he came up with the problems).

 

[Mépris]

Fine. You feel stupid. What are you going to do about it?

My philosophy is that if I feel stupid, I should accept it, and then revolt. Change it. What am I doing wrong? Will working another hour on that concept/problem be worth my time or should I finally seek some external help? Accepting that one is stupid is a great way to get smarter and this loop of "feeling stupid ---> countering with trying to be smarter ----> feeling stupid again ----> trying to be even smarter" will always be there, which from where I stand, looks pretty cool.

It's the same when you talk to people who you think are smarter than you. If you'd like to have an "intellectual life", it's a bad idea to spend time with people who are as stupid as you. Find smarter people.

 

[phoenix:\\]

You being a girl is irrelevant. Your professor is making it a bit easy for you students or else you wouldn't be at an A near the end of your semester.

Students (or some) typically go through a roller coaster of emotions, smart at top, then comes the drop, dumb, "oh I am smart again", drop, "oh... I am dumb again." Put some effort into your physics work as you are majoring in it, and go to a tutor to help you see things your book (calculus) isn't showing you. Read a different text to see if you may understand it a different way. Sometimes the exposition of texts is what throws you off, I had to retreat from Stewart's calculus to Thomas/Finney Calculus and that helped a lot in terms of understanding what I was doing rather than aimlessly plugging in numbers and getting a result back.

 

[QuarkCharmer]

Here is how I feel:

 

[twofu]

I'm an undergrad in physics, and I have mostly A's and a B/B+ here and there in my physics/math courses, but I still feel stupid 98% of the time. I think most of the stuff you're saying I can relate to, its pretty normal as most have said..

I can't speak for everyone but in my experience my math department isn't very good at teaching. They assign super easy standard textbook problems (stewart calculus) and then make up their own insane problems for the exams. It's like making you practice running 100 meters and then on race day, making you run a 10 miler. It just doesn't work; math is about practice.

Like most said, just tank through it. physics gets really fun! (2nd semester of E&M rocks, antennas, radiation, and SR derivation!)

 

[ParticleGrl]

Just feel like I have everything working against me. I'm stupid. A girl.

Don't internalize- you are struggling because the material is difficult. Its not some intrinsic property of you- everyone struggles sometimes.

So what can you do? First, don't struggle alone. Form a study group and work problems together- I'd bet many of your classmates already work in such a group. When you are struggling with a problem- go to a professor or TA office hours (do NOT look up how to do it online). Get a hint from them, not the whole solution. Struggling makes you stronger- skipping to the solution accomplishes nothing.

 

[twofish-quant]

I feel the same way, and so do the top few students in my class. I'm starting to believe that being made to feel stupid continually by arrogant & unhelpful professors is part of the "training" to do some serious intellectual gruntwork on one's own.

Yup. That's part of the program. Once your realize that it's part of the program, the professors suddenly become less arrogant and unhelpful.

 

[twofish-quant]

Make up a final exam that every single student fails, then insult students in exam revisions. (ie: 1 or 2 problems, 100% of the grade that are four standard deviations higher in difficulty than any problem solved in-class or in the bibliography, often involving tricks that only the prof would know as he came up with the problems).

That prepares you for graduate school in which the professors will start hitting you with problems they have no clue what they answers are to. One thing that happens is that once you start getting used to the system, it becomes second nature enough so that by the time you actually get into a position where you set up the course, you teach it in the same way that it was taught to you.

I haven't seen an undergraduate courses in which every single student fails. I have seen courses in which you are a hyper-genius if you make a 60 on the exam. Personally, if I were giving a final exam to physics majors and anyone came close to an 80 on the exam, I would consider it too easy.

 

[SophusLies]

When I was an undergrad I felt stupid almost everyday but I think that's what made me fight through things to understand them. Lol, QuickCharmer's graph is exactly how I felt when I was an undergrad and it's gotten even worse as a grad student, actually the y-axis is near 0 now.

What makes it so difficult is the material is a cultivation of many, many people that contributed a specific piece to the puzzle and now you're learning it all in 4 years time. That's an uphill battle; you're the underdog and whether you succeed or not is up to you. Keep grinding it out no matter what happens.

 

[homeomorphic]

I felt smart until grad school (in math), and after 6 years of it and not being able to graduate this year, I feel like a complete idiot. Not everyone feels stupid at the beginning, but almost everyone feels stupid at some point, once they get far enough because it keeps getting harder. But sometimes the people who felt stupid at the beginning can catch up to the others. Even when I didn't do well, I felt smart for a long time because I just felt like I was not that great at taking tests, but was pretty good at understanding things.

I had huge problems with calculus, not with the intuitive aspects but the lack of physical application / motivation for so many of the problems. The problems seemed to usually be just empty symbol-shuffling with no connection to any plausible situation.

Somehow, I don't have trouble with dumb calculus problems, even though I sympathize with your viewpoint. I just look at them as examples where you can compute things and test what you know about the intuitive concepts with calculation. Whether or not it's relevant to anything physical is not really the point. The idea of integration is applicable, so it makes sense to just get good at it by doing lots of examples and then when some example comes up in real life, once you are good at integration, you either work it out or have a computer do it. So, if the general idea of integrating stuff is applicable, I think that ought to be enough, rather than specific problems being applicable. As long as the calculations aren't needed in the further development of the theory, I'm happy.

I am told some people (math major "naturals") can limit the amount of disconnected facts they need to cram into their head by remembering the steps of the derivation and re-deriving as they go, but it seldom works for me.

I'm a math major natural. It's not necessarily the steps of the derivation. I just try to look at it in a way that makes it obvious that it's true. Often, this involves visualization of some sort. Once you get that feeling that it's obvious, a lot of times, it's easy to rederive the proof if you want.

I find the purely symbolic, unvisualizable "Bourbaki virus" approach to be a huge impediment in most math literature.

Yeah, it is pretty ridiculous, but I don't know if the problem is so acute in calculus. In differential equations, it can get pretty bad. But I don't think it's Bourbaki. There are TWO, not one source of bad math today (actually, there may be some overlap). One is Bourbaki-style which is really abstract and unmotivated. But the other source is that of the mathematicians who love ugly calculations, rather than abstraction. Both of these schools of thought HATE conceptual understanding and aspire to make math as ugly as they possibly can.

I have a sneaking suspicion that these mathematicians go to great pains to erase the method that they actually used to arrive at their conclusions and substitute more "elegant" or "rigorous" but less intuitive proofs.

I have a different sneaking suspicion. I think, in many cases, they don't know how to arrive at their conclusions and are just copying from other sources. Of course, they can follow the steps of their proofs, but in a lot of cases, I doubt they could have come up with the proofs on their own. So, probably the erasing when on a lot further back in the past (specifically, I mean, textbooks probably just copy other textbooks and papers).

There may be a reason why this erasing happens, and I don't think it's intentional. Speaking as someone who is trying to write down a fairly involved proof of a new theorem at the moment (the set-up and proof are about 20 pages, as of right now), I can say that I'm not confident that the theorem is true until it is written. Writing a proof down is essentially a way to convince yourself that your result is true. So, the primary purpose of writing a paper is deemed to be to establish the truth of a result, rather than communication. It's hard to worry about the exposition when you are worrying about whether the thing is correct. I hope my thesis will be reasonable clear conceptually, but it isn't optimized for teaching or learning the material. The main thing is to get it written down and checked for errors. With a finite amount of time at your disposal, you might not figure out the best way to convey your thought processes the first time you write something down.

Also, people just copy what they see other people doing. They see lots of other formal math papers and then they get the idea that that is what a math paper is "supposed" to be like. And then they write that way. Or they just get caught up in the efficiency of the abstract approach (doing things in generality means you don't have to prove the same things twice). Or they just aren't very imaginative, so they are unable to visualize anything, which cripples their ability to understand anything, as well as their ability to come up with anything understandable. I don't think they intentionally do it to make it obscure. Although Descartes is said to have done it intentionally.

 

[R.P.F.]

I felt smart until grad school (in math), and after 6 years of it and not being able to graduate this year, I feel like a complete idiot. Not everyone feels stupid at the beginning, but almost everyone feels stupid at some point, once they get far enough because it keeps getting harder.

Good luck. At least you made into grad school and passed your prelims. A lot of people weren't able to make it to that point.

 

[Lavabug]

That prepares you for graduate school in which the professors will start hitting you with problems they have no clue what they answers are to. One thing that happens is that once you start getting used to the system, it becomes second nature enough so that by the time you actually get into a position where you set up the course, you teach it in the same way that it was taught to you.

I haven't seen an undergraduate courses in which every single student fails. I have seen courses in which you are a hyper-genius if you make a 60 on the exam. Personally, if I were giving a final exam to physics majors and anyone came close to an 80 on the exam, I would consider it too easy.

That's assuming I can get into graduate school, which I'm not too confident about with the grades I'm getting on finals (some profs deliberately cap the grade on 2nd and 3rd resits). I should point out that I attend university in Spain, where 5/10 is a passing grade, and where its very common to see billboards with scores of 1's and 2's for courses all through freshman and senior years. Students who never retake several courses and spend less than 7 years as an undergrad are the exception, at least at my institution... which is considered "easy" by people from Madrid's Complutense.

 

[Nano-Passion]

Here is how I feel:

Hmmm.. very interesting. Does the sequence converge to 0?

I'm an undergrad in physics, and I have mostly A's and a B/B+ here and there in my physics/math courses, but I still feel stupid 98% of the time. I think most of the stuff you're saying I can relate to, its pretty normal as most have said..

I can't speak for everyone but in my experience my math department isn't very good at teaching. They assign super easy standard textbook problems (stewart calculus) and then make up their own insane problems for the exams. It's like making you practice running 100 meters and then on race day, making you run a 10 miler. It just doesn't work; math is about practice.

Like most said, just tank through it. physics gets really fun! (2nd semester of E&M rocks, antennas, radiation, and SR derivation!)

My professor did that for Physics II and Calc II. Funny thing was that he kept telling us how easy he will make the test and that it would be a very quick one. After having taken the test and realized that it was the toughest one yet by far, I asked him about it. Later on he admitted that it was tough and he wanted to give a challenge. :rofl:

Yup. That's part of the program. Once your realize that it's part of the program, the professors suddenly become less arrogant and unhelpful.

I've always felt that my professor did that on purpose. I wonder if he was trying to help people out by being condescending or he wanted to flaunt his intelligence.

 

[Angry Citizen]

are you sure you always have? Think back to introductory physics and calculus courses. Were you understanding most of what was taught? In my case, I can implement techniques after learning them but am left with little working understanding of what I just learned. It works just fine for now but I'm afraid that eventually, my luck will run out despite my interest and fervent effort to keep it going. Creativity isn't in me. Should I look elsewhere?

I can follow a formula, but am hard-pressed to diverge from it and apply other knowledge that I know.

My introductory physics and calculus courses were actually "harder" than my dynamics and differential equations classes, in the sense that I didn't really understand what was going on in those intro classes. Intro physics isn't really designed to teach you physics, it's designed to teach you how to think in terms of physics, how to set up equations, etc. Physics is hard - until miraculously, physics stops being hard. You'll get there yet.

And I agree with the others, don't blame your gender. Girls aren't any dumber than boys; get that out of your head right now.

 

[rppearso]

I got a D in calc 3, finished my chemical engineering degree with that D. Went on later to get my PE in chemical engineering and then took a course in advanced engineering math and got an A, I basicly had to reteach myself all of calc 3 and some of the other calculus material that I did not learn as well as the new material in the advanced engineering math class, it took me about 30 hrs a week to make that A in advanced engineering math but I felt like it was redemptive.

I have since back filled the main undergraduate electrical engineering classes and am going to start a masters in electrical engineering in a year or so. There are so many distractions and other problems when your 18-22 living at a university.

When your buryed in debt to get your first degree in a school with mostly guys and the girls don't give you the time of day, its not a good recipie for success.