[jordanpg]

> If LLMs were around when I was a student, I would've also used them to "speed up" my homework assignments then proceed to fail all my tests.

As a counterpoint, I was once a physics grad student. I didn't finish the PhD because at some point I discovered that I was not going to be the next Richard Feynman and this was too much for my ego at the time. But I think that if LLMs were available, I might have finished.

Part of my problem was that at some point the math transitioned from stuff I understood to symbols and notation that I knew how to manipulate but didn't really understand. LLMs could have helped bridge that gap.

On the other hand, it's hard to imagine I wouldn't have used it for Jackson, etc. but we got Jackson solutions from previous students and the internet anyway. Using LLMs probably would have been more effective, used correctly.

[tstrimple]

This is also where I had issues advancing in math. For so long I was able to build intuition around mathematical concepts easily. They fit in my head and made sense. I couldn’t understand why my peers were so bad and slow at picking up the concepts. Until my first calculus class where there was absolutely no focus on the intuition or practical utility. It was just formulas for the sake of formulas as exposed by our teacher.

It wasn’t until I was curious enough to learn about calculus outside of the classroom that I was exposed to things which helped develop that intuition and made the calculations something other than just symbols and equations to memorize.