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Going to Universtity - basic knowledge

Bagseed

Bagseed

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Hi,

the following semester, I plan on studying chemistry at my local university and I'm pretty enthusiastic about it and already read up on the subject. One major problem is that my highschool education is not that good regarding science. I haven't had either physics or chemistry in highschool and the math they teached us wasn't on top as well.
A good friend of mine studies math and physics and is willing to help me out on getting basic knowlede on these subjects, but I'm also curious about how I can gather information and material myself. Any help would be appreciated, be it general hints or good websites for learning stuff.

thanks in advance. :)
 
Have you already enrolled? Your University may offer preparatory classes to get you all caught up in science and maths, or you could just take these prerequisites at a community college if you are in the US.

For off the record learning, there is a plethora of free education out there. Try Academic Earth, there are open courses at Stanford, Yale, Harvard. Pretty much any major university should offer some kind of open source material.
 
There will be pure maths and/or physics units in any Chem,Bio,Med degree. Prep or refresher courses offered by your uni in these areas is a good idea.
In terms of getting your chem up to scratch a good Introductory Chemistry textbook should cover everything from high school and also a lot of the 1st year material, it will also give you a good idea of the equations and if your math is up to scratch.

You can pick up second hand intro chem textbooks all over the net for very cheap, some come with interactive cds/dvds or accessible online content.
 
You might be able to find chem books at a library. I wish I could've graduated without having to take chem!

SIG FIGS ARE A MOTHER FUCKER. :D
 
Khan Academy (khanacademy.org) has lecture videos that might be of help.
 
http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/
this is a good book on linear algebra... maybe it's a bit too much for what you need now, but reading the first two chapters won't hurt.
as other poster said, there are website that offer mass online courses (usually) at undergrad level. For instance: coursera, edx, novoed (maybe not useful as the others), stanford class2go (not used anymore, but there's a nice course on database that's still accessible). But if you actually want to complete the course you'll have to work on it for a few hours every week.

Googling is also a good idea :P
For instance, just searching for "learn calculus" gives this as first result http://www-math.mit.edu/~djk/calculus_beginners/ and plenty of other websites similar to this one.
 
I had never really payed attention in the one chem class I took in high school (didn't even pass the regents for it) so when I took chem 1 and chem 2 in college I was lost. Chem 1 wasn't too bad, but make sure you pay attention in it because it lays the groundwork out for all of the chem classes above it.

I think that you can jump right in to chem 1 since it's introductory, but make sure to try to master it instead of just getting a passing grade otherwise you won't make it far. Everything from chem 1 is expected to be common knowledge among chem 2 students and the professor will likely say "I'm not going to explain that since you were supposed to have learned that in chem 1" at least a few times throughout the course.

My best advice is to get a tutor! Also, make sure that you absolutely know what protons, neutrons, electrons, valance states, atomic numbers, atomic mass, electron shells and what everything on the periodic table means. Chem 1 is a lot of memorization so it's not so much about grasping concepts as the next courses will be. For math involved in chem you will need to have a scientific calculator and know sin, cos, tan, etc... Chem 2 has a ton of math and you will have to solve more complex problems than chem 1.

Another big thing to study is conversion tables of mass, volume, and temperature (changing Celsius to Fahrenheit to Kelvin). There are a number of Laws you will have to memorize as well. You can definitely learn a lot of basic chemistry by reading the text books and then trying to do the problems at the end of each section. You should be able to learn the first 3 or 4 chapters on your own without having someone explain it to you, so try to do that before you start the course, and then the professor can explain what you didn't understand.
 
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