Pretty easy class, Labs were longer than expected but the content was pretty easy and as long as you are decent at writing you'll do fine. Tests were pretty mild and everything was online which made it a lot easier too

Content was very interesting to me

Professor was good, clearly was passionate about the topics and explained them well

I found the content to be pretty interesting, although the labs were mostly pretty boring and difficult at times.

PHYS110 is a fairly difficult first-year course. If you aren’t in engineering and can take PHYS102 instead, take it!!!!

Travis Martin is a great professor that made most concepts very clear by going through several examples related to the topic. Unfortunately, these examples do tend to lead to him getting a little sidetracked and begin explaining something that IS physics-related, just not course material-related. He also seemed to be uninformed about some aspects of the course, like a section of the textbook missing (DC circuit). However, I blame the course coordinator and author of the textbook for not including that.

Do all the assignments and optional teaching assignments. They’re including useful for studying.

The course is quite difficult. Concepts seemed easy to grasp, but I frequently found myself performing worse than I expected on midterms and found assignments more challenging than I expected. The textbook was brutal to read through, so I found little help there, but Dr. Laidlaw's video lectures and posted notes were usually more helpful. The labs were a bit rough to work through, but weren't too difficult to do well on once I knew what would lose marks. Exams are all multiple choice, so it's easy to lose marks for getting the wrong answer where other courses will give part marks for your process, but they are generally set up so that if you know the theory you can still do fairly well even if you get incorrect numerical answers.

The course covers pretty much everything high school physics does, but in more depth. Some lecture time was spent on the calculus behind the equations, as well as representing directional components as vectors rather than completely separate components. Since it is such a broad course, there will be concepts that won't be useful in the long run, but there are others that will continue to be useful.

Dr. Martin explains concepts very clearly, and his examples usually illustrate the topic well. He also spends a fair amount of time in lectures answering questions, and his answers are generally quite good, although he does sometimes come across as condescending.

Give yourself lots of time to complete assignments and labs and to study for exams. Make sure you know the theory to concepts, don't rely on being able to just plug numbers into formulas.

Overall, a cool course that I'd wish I had committed myself more to. However, also a very difficult and time-intensive one. Difficulty: One of the most difficult courses I've taken so far, on account of the fact that the material is going to be quite different from what you're used to. The theory is quite abstract and the new notation for vectors and matrices will take getting used to. The assignments were also quite long and difficult with computational elements to them, although not pointlessly so. I also wasn't the biggest fan of the course textbook (McIntyre) since the order it covered the material in was very different from the order we covered the material in class, but I still found it useful enough. Interest: I mean, it's quantum mechanics, of course it's going to be interesting!...read more

1. I think it would be helpful to forget any pre-existing notions of quantum mechanics you have before diving into this course! (Except what you've learned in 215, of course.) 2. Be prepared to devote a large amount of time into this course, for the workload's quite steep (difficult material + assignments + computational + labs + 3 midterms + final when I took it.) 3. Do whatever you can to not fall behind in this course!!! Won't be easy to catch up.

I found this to be a pretty interesting course. Can be a GPA booster, but you have to put in the work. The labs can be tedious though.

Show up for class and do the clicker questions. Create condensed notes from the PowerPoint slides to help with the weekly quizzes and final exam.

Martin is a fantastic prof and makes this class very interesting, definitely a much better / captivating class than Intro PHYS 1. Martin uses a lot of class participation to drive home examples and is a very good all around.

Do all the homework and make sure you get down the core concepts.

Great GPA booster. Easy if you give enough effort to pass. Labs are long and depending on the TA can be hit or miss.

Study, do the clicker questions in class (easy marks!). Be extra prepared for the final, it will be harder than you think.