I went to a Calc 2 lecture as a non-STEM major

I scored a perfect 500 on the FCAT math in the 4th grade.

I got a blue ribbon from the principal, a pretty generous slice of marbled cake with cream cheese frosting, and a promise that I was one of the brightest young minds that Griffin Elementary School had ever seen. With this supposedly major achievement, I was the one that kids asked for help before tests so I couldn’t help but feel like a mini-genius. Unfortunately, my excelling in math came to a halt when I tackled IB Pre-Calculus, rather—it tackled me—as a sophomore in high school. My dreams of being a surgeon were thrown out of the window the first time I met trigonometry and the notorious Unit Circle and I eventually developed an affinity for marketing, my current major that I love.

My friends from high school are all on the engineering track, and I wanted to take a walk in their shoes and see what it was like to deal with numbers all day. So I mustered up the courage to sit in on a MAC2312 lecture, the infamous Calc 2 – also known as UF’s hardest class.

Here are the details of my demise.

I arrive 15 minutes early and there are a substantial amount of seats filled, even students giving a little pre-class advice.

Professor Nowell walks in and I see everyone sit up and get their notebooks out. I follow suit and eagerly start to take notes. We’re covering the fallback method to solve for polynomials in the third degree.

I dig into my backpack to get another pen and when I look up, some Chinese is on the board. 

I’ve taken math before, but I’ve never known that so many different letters could be in the same level. He keeps asking if we have any questions and I don’t get how no one has any! But anyway, now we’re doing some type of elimination method.. Does that mean I can eliminate myself from this class?

He says we’re “moving on to the fun stuff now.” Which apparently is dealing with a repeated quadratic factor that’s irreducible. Honestly, I have no idea what any of this means, I just know that he used an entire piece of paper for a math problem, and that’s my cue to leave.

What did going to this unnecessarily hard lecture teach me? It taught me that math will never be my thing and gave me a new respect for STEM majors. I’ll finish this with a quote from the struggling student next to me, “I don’t ever know what he says, I just write it down and pray after.” – CJ Lockwood.