How many hours per week for Waves & Oscillations?

[Eric_meyers]

I'm budgeting my time for the upcoming semester, and I've made a goal with myself to spend at the bare minimum 8 hours per week for an undergraduate course in Waves + Oscillations - with a surplus of 14 hours for a week that has an exam in it.

Does this seem like a reasonable amount of time?

 

[lisab]

Does this time budget include class time and labs, or is it just for homework?

 

[Pengwuino]

Depends on how hard hte class is and how good of a student you are. You'll be the one who is best able to determine how much studying you need.

 

[Eric_meyers]

Does this time budget include class time and labs, or is it just for homework?

Just for homework: I have a part time job as well as taking 5 classes + 2 labs this semester so I have to budget my time very carefully. I was wondering what other people have experienced through a waves undergrad course?

 

[lisab]

Just for homework: I have a part time job as well as taking 5 classes + 2 labs this semester so I have to budget my time very carefully. I was wondering what other people have experienced through a waves undergrad course?

Wow, your're really taking on a busy schedule!

The penguin is wise: it's really going to depend on you. Eight hours is probably doable if you have had some exposure to this material in high school, and are good at math. But if it's all new to you, it will probably take more time...as a general rule, the labs are incredible time sinks, but they're critical to learning the material.

When I took this class (which was a while ago, so the memory is a bit ~) the labs took a *long* time to write up. The homework always seemed to take longer than I budgeted for, too.

 

[arunma]

For what it's worth, the waves, optics, and relativity course in my department was a senior level class. By senior year I pretty much had the physics major thing figured out; I knew how to think about physics and how to do homework assignments. I probably only spent four or five hours a week on the class. Of course, I'm not you, and you might require more or less studying.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Depends on how hard hte class is and how good of a student you are.

Exactly. I've seen schools where this class is a cakewalk, and schools where this is the weed-out class.

 

[Nick M]

I'll be taking the EE version of this next year. I've heard it is a course that at least 75% of EE's find to be the most difficult Undergrad course required (I attend UMass).

I've been reviewing Electromagnetics and Vector Calculus over the summer. My Multivariate and Differential Equations math teacher recommended "Div, Grad, Curl, and All That" as a supplementary book on informal Vector Calculus to accompany what I learned in Multivariate Calculus and Physics II as a form of preparatory learning/review. I really enjoyed the concept of line integrals in Multivariate, and flux integrals in the above text, so I'm hoping I won't be too lost in "Fields and Waves". Being a 4-credit lecture course, I know I'm in store for some sleepless nights and 12-packs of Coke Zero...

 

[Eric_meyers]

^I think our curriculum differ - in my course sequence we're just now starting line integrals/surface integrals and our waves & oscillations isn't an upper division just a lower division course.

I don't think it has "fields" in it either, just waves and oscillations - although I could just be ignorant on the topic and there are in fact vector fields to wrestle with or something like that.