so, i just spent 2 and a half hours doing my chemistry lab. no, i take that back. i just spent 2 and a half hours doing my chemistry pre-lab write up. that was 2 and a half hours of learning how to determine "percentage error," "absolute certainty," "absolute error," "percent relative average deviation," "percent standard deviation of the mean" and lots of other things that, undoubtedly, will be extremely useful to me later in my career. honestly, the policies of this school makes me want to pull my hair out. i can't believe that i'm actually forced to take classes like this, classes that i honestly hate more than anything else i can think of.
i mean, for crying out loud, there is no bloody purpose to any of it. and why do they tell me it's necessary? because i "need to know how to work in a laboratory." because, you know, i haven't taken 4 upper division OBEE lab classes, where we were taught to use things like "error" and other such statistical garbage to compile our results.
make the chemistry students take the chemistry labs!!!
let the biology students take the biology labs!!!
don't mix and match, making us take crap we hate, crap we're going to forget, crap we cram for, crap we're never going to use, because you can't offer enough specific classes!!!
i mean, come on! i'm wasting 6 classes of my 42-ish classes at this school taking a subject that, in my opinion, is one of the many tools of the devil. to what? perhaps, prepare me for some of the upper division bio stuff that has something to do with chemistry? sure, that makes sense. so, if there's about 18% relevant crap in each of my 6 chem classes, i'll be set to take those upper div molecular bio classes involving chem. the chemistry majors only have to take 6 lower div chem classes! we take just as many!!! because, you know, it makes sense that a bio major's chem series is the same length as the chem major's chem series.
solution: why the hell don't they have one chem class, two, tops, explaining us not all about the lame moles, titrations, spectrometry, and pi orbital crap, but the stuff that is relevant to the biology!!! i mean, some of us are some of the nation's brightest here at ucla, with some of the best professors, so how can they get off, teaching us all this stuff that we will all invariably forget? it's the stupidest thing on the planet! couldn't we learn enough in one or two relevant classes? this would not only free up four quarters to take more stuff we're actually interested in, but chemistry presented in a light that we're interested in will stick in our heads exponentially better. so, ridiculously, lame.
and it's like this in all our classes. we also have to take 4 physics classes. 4 math. all this crap. being done with math, i can for sure say, that learning multi-variable calculus has never come up in any of my upper div. bio classes. and the worst part is, you can't get out of it. some people, they can take it. it's ok in their mind, "if those in power say it's so, maybe they're right, and i should trust." and i can't. i cannot just allow it. i even considered changing my major, so i wouldn't have to take so much chemistry. ironically enough, my boss changed her major so she wouldn't have to take anymore. she was biology, and now she's french. yeah, that's a testament to the effectiveness of a school system. you have people changing their majors, changing their entire life's direction because they can't cope with having to take half a dozen classes of a subject that not only they hate, but is largely irrelevant.
GAH!!!!
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