I guess the ultimate question is, what do you really want to do? A college degree gets your foot in the door in the "area" of what you want to do.. but doesnt necessarily mean you will get a job in that subject.

I have a CE (computer engineering) degree from UofA (which is a different degree from many other CEs offered at other colleges. Its pretty much an EE with 4-5 computer related courses thrown in). Currently I am software engineer and program to my hearts content although I never had any real big programming classes. I havent used any of my EE stuff (nor calc1,2,3,4,diffeq and all the other math classes I had to take) since I graduated 5 years ago =/.

But I wanted a software career so thats what I applied for, got some experience and in the real world (as far as I can tell) its your experience that gets you the job you want but if you dont have a degree in anything they just toss your chances out.

PAR

Math is the reason I'm a theater/writing major. I passed my Prob./Stat. class, and hopefully that's the last math class I'll have to take. Ever.

My wife has a masters in Information Systems and Decision Science. She currently works for a Major oil company as a UNIX administrator. Keeping that in mind as far as what you can do career-wise with CS versus ISDS degrees I would say it doesn't matter all that much.

Taking calculus was a humiliating experience. I was used to history classes and kept tying to conceptualize everything, only to realize after the class was done that you don't have to conceptualize calculus to do well in the class. You just go through the motions the professor demonstrates on the board. In fact, the one time the professor had a question that required understanding of the concepts involved, almost everyone in the 100+ student class (even most of the good students) got it wrong. Whatever you need to do to get through the class, do it if it's interfering with your plans.

I dropped it my first time through at FSU. Not only did I hate it but I had a Chinese teacher that, quite literally, no one could understand. Not a word. His writing was only marginally more legible and I realized on the final day of drop/add that there was simply not enough pixie dust in the world to carry my ass to a passing grade. Got a different teacher the following semester and got an A.

With respect, calculus is far easier if you understand the concepts and then are allowed to internalize them. Doing approximations and such in your head is a great exercise for that. I found that I had real trouble with calculus until I found a professor who was an engineer in a previous career. He pointed out that if you really need precision, a machine is going to do the calculations. Thus, practical calculus was scratch with a pencil and estimate mentally - based on understanding the principles of what the equations were telling you. That really opened a door for me. It's really an extension of the techniques you might have learned in linear algebra, essentially being able to look at an equation and describe roughly the curve described and it's position on a graph. If you can do that with linear algebra, you can do calculus in your head, to a reasonable degree of accuracy. (Naturally, after twenty years of not using it, I can't do this to the degree I could, but I can still puzzle it out.)

The textbook we used was amazing and I recommend it to anyone trying to learn the subject. It's an old book by Sylvanus P Thompson, updated by none other than Martin Gardner. It's called "Calculus Made Easy". It's great because it discusses the how as well as the what, in a *practical* way - you don't have to replicate Newton's or Leibniz's theorems in order to understand how to do the work and what it means. Then, there are problems with solutions - along with common errors and how to recognize and avoid them. It's great.

So try that first, before you give up on Calc entirely. (Oh, and Kat is entirely right, calc is just math shorthand for stuff that happens in the world of physics.)

I passed out of math when I started college, went for an English degree, and never looked back. I've thought about going for an MBA, but that's math. Yucky.

Ultimately, just get a degree. If it's close to something you'd like to do, all the better. The important thing is that you can say you're a college grad. Then you need to network to find a job. I know very few people who got jobs without going through friends and relations.

Man, I was a total math fiend until Calculus. I even placed in state competitions in geometry and trigonometry. But calc? Geez, that never quite made sense to me. I've still got no idea how I eked out a B in calculus in college. I didn't really understand most of it. I mean, concepts made some sense, but mechanics didn't. I never took another math class after that. Which sucked, because when I later took physics (there were two primary physics courses, one requiring calc and one only requiring trig; I took the latter option), I could see where only having the math go up to the trigonometry level was really limiting our exploration of physics.

I'll jump on the physics train, too. I didn't learn a darn thing in my high school calculus classes, but learned enough via physics to ace the exams.

Also, I can make even nerdier jokes now.

And in today's Out of Context Theatre, we showcase the inimitable Wordsmythe, who sums up the college experience in one pithy English Major sentence.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.

In all fairness, I passed out more than just at the beginning.

I'm not worried about getting a degree, as I'm already two classes away from my Associate of Arts/Oregon Transfer degree. Specifically a Science and Social Science class short. I hope to get those two taken care of in Spring term, as I wasn't able to register for Winter. Thinking about taking an Economics class to fulfill the Social Science requirement, or maybe a Criminology class. As for Science... I have no idea. I already filled out the majority of my Science credits with the three Geology classes., and most of the others require math/physics classes. Ugh.

I have no idea what you're talking about. If you're asking if at was a cake course, then no. There were plenty of people who dropped out of the courses, as well as several who failed, so that by the end of the third course, the class had been whittled down from `30 students to about 13-15. I, however, got consistent A's (well, two of them were A-'s, but let's not split hairs here).

However, the fact that the person who taught the course was my science teacher for three science classes in high school helped in that I understood his teachng style and testing format. Plus, two of his classes I took in high school, Geology and Hydrosphere, overlapped with what he taught in the college courses quite nicely.

I still email him every so often with interesting articles I find online, such as the one I posted here about the Birth of an Island. He's a cool guy, really easy to get along with. I love having teachers like that, and I've been lucky to have quite a few.