[BeetleB]

> It's that I hate calculus. Not the subject itself, just the grinding away at problem sets.

Most math majors I knew hated the standard calculus courses, for precisely this reason. It's taught this way because they're targeting engineers and some hard sciences (physics).

The reason is that for many of those majors (EE, physics), you will take courses where doing calculus is your daily bread and butter. You need to be as adept at it as algebra. Over 50% of HW problems in those courses will involve calculus. They really don't want students who understand circuits but can't do anything useful because they stumble on calculus.

They are the largest "customers" of the math department, so the department caters to them.

[defrost]

I swapped out from being an Engineering major (consistently in the top 5 scoring Engineering students out of a first year intake of 300) to being a math major for similar reasons - Engineering has a lot of rote learning grind exams, not so much exploration of deep fundementals.

The Math dept has numerours courses loosely covering similar material, Math 100 - first year math for math nerds, Math 110 - first math for engineering students, Math 120 - math for business majors, etc.

Math for math majors ( the 100 stream ) had 20 students in all (IIRC) most of whom now hold academic positions, Math 110 had the 300 engineering students, other streams had cross over students from business, medicine, law, et al.

Future mathematicians (and theoritical physicists, etc) are indeed the smallest group the Math Dept. catered for.