| FWiW I started out in Engineering and transferred out to a more serious mathematics | physics stream. The Engineering curriculum as I found it was essentially rote for the first two years. It had more exams and units than any other courses (including Medicine and Law which tagged in pretty close) and included Chemistry 110 (for Engineers) in the Chemistry Department, Physics 110 (for Engineers) in the Physics Department, Mathematics 110 (for Engineers) in the Mathematics Department, and Tech Drawing, Statics & Dynamics, Electrical Fundementals, etc in the Engineering Department. All these 110 courses for Engineers covered "the things you need to know to practically use this infomation" .. how to use Linear Algebra to solve loading equations in truss configurations, etc. These were harder than the 115 and 130 courses that were "{Chemistry | Math | Physics} for Business Majors" etc. that essentially taught familiarity with subjects so you could talk with the Engineers you employed, etc. But none of the 110 courses got into the meat of their subjects in the same way as the 100 courses, these were taught to instruct people who intended to really master. Maths, Physics, or Chemistry. Within a week or two of starting first year university I transfered out of the Maths 110 Engineering unit and into Math 100, ditto Chem and Physics. Halfway through second year I formally left Engineering the curriculum altogether (although I later became a professional Engineer .. go figure). The big distinction between Math 100 V. Math 110 was the 110 course didn't go into how anything "worked", it was entirely about how to use various math concepts to solve specific problems. Math 100 was fundementals, fundementals, fundementals - how to prove various results, how to derive new versions of old things, etc. Six months into Math 100 nothing had been taught that could be directly used to solve problems already covered in Math 110. Six months and one week into Math 100 and suddenly you could derive for yourself from first principals everything required to be memorised in Math 110 and Math 210 (Second year "mathematics for engineers"). |