I get physics is a class every engineering major has to take, even if ur major has no relation to physics at all, which can be really annoying that u have to take this super hard class to not even utilize any of it. however, i would definitely take this course seriously regardless of ur major if u want to pass it. Exam questions are all conceptual. You need a solid concecptual understanding of the material, and that starts with going to lecture, reading the textbook, actually trying the hw, and practice practice practice! you need to put in time everyday for physics if u truly want to do go well on these exams. even though the workload is light (literally one hw assignment a week) that doesn’t mean to do physics once a week. it’s not that the concepts are difficult to learn, it actually ca...read more

physics is useful for later engineering classes, especially for people who have to take statics, thermodynamics/hydrodynamics, dynamics, MOM, etc. later in their engineering degree.

the professors aren’t horrible like everyone is saying, but you should know that a good amount of learning is going to be from urself. office hours are helpful though.

seriously, start studying for the exams at least 2 weeks before go to lectures!!!! the exam is based heavily off of problems you do in lectures and from the homework physics is a grind but definitely do-able. study together!! do problems with other students helped me a lot surprisingly, so i’d recommend having a study group

goes fast but isnt hard. study the practice exams !!

Physics is, inherently, a complicated topic. An entire branch of math called calculus was designed to explain physics. Too much of lecture time is dedicated to the derivation of equations. For those who have genuine and great interest in physics or in majors where physics is ever-present, I'm sure this is helpful. For those who won't deal with physics on a day-to-day or for those who learn better with practice, the information truly seems irrelevant and the lecture thus seems like a waste of time. If you fall into the latter, you will not find this class enjoyable and you will be "teaching" yourself most of the material.

Physics can be interesting, but past a certain point, say kinematics or rotational motion, the concepts truly become too abstract and it's hard to relate/analogize the material to become useful for memorization/practice.

Yelton, like many other professors, is here for academic research in his field. He is, by all means, very qualified in his field. However, not all researchers are excellent teachers for a broad audience. If you attend his office hours, he's excellent help, but for those who can't afford to attend office hours or feel like his type of instruction doesn't suit you, you will inevitably end up with StudyEdge (which sometimes offers too simple of an explanation or doesn't thoroughly cover every case in terms of material).

Practice practice practice. You will find a lot of similarity between the exams and practice exams as well as similarity in the homework questions and the quiz questions. Doing one problem of homework is not enough to understand what that problem is asking. Make your own classification of different types of problems and make sure you can classify what type of problem you're doing and what equations and relationships you will use before you tackle it.

Very confusing, study edge did not help much either.

As someone with no physics background, it goes quite quickly, but that’s not necessarily the problem. They don’t really explain the examples they do in class well, so it’s hard to follow the concepts after you just immediately learned it. Yelton did make some prerecorded videos towards the end of the semester, which were very helpful. But it was just not a great class