As you write your self-evaluation, you might find our program learning goals (available in the fall syllabus and the winter syllabus update) to be useful. Below, I’ve consolidated them to try to reflect what you’ve had the opportunity to do by the end of winter quarter.
Through your work in fall and winter quarter, you have had the opportunity to:
- Improve your ability to articulate and assume responsibility for your own work.
- Strengthen your collaborative skills and the ability to respond in useful ways to the work of colleagues.
- Improve your skills in clear communication of historical, mathematical, and scientific ideas, both orally and in writing.
- Improve your ability to analyze the structure, content, and objectives of a text with focus on developing conceptual understanding and procedural skills and understanding themes and argument.
- Understand key ideas in the trajectory of human thought towards modern physics.
- Strengthen research skills and knowledge of resources associated with the history of physics.
- Gain a deeper understanding of mathematical thinking by exploring how non-Western cultures have incorporated mathematics.
- Develop a broad and deep understanding of a mathematical or physical concept and clearly communicate the key features of that concept to a non-specialist audience.
- Deepen your prerequisite understanding of the concepts of function, slope, and limits which form the backdrop for calculus and improve your algebra skills.
- Learn the definitions of the derivative and the integral, and be able to relate them to algebraic, numerical, graphical, or verbal descriptions and data.
- Learn to calculate derivatives and integrals using a variety of standard techniques.
- Learn to use derivatives and integrals in applied problems, particularly in the context of the physical sciences.
- Utilize the mathematical models that describe and explain motion in the natural world.
- Understand that physics is based on a few key principles that can be applied to a wide range of natural phenomena.
- See the central role that unification plays in physics.
- Experience that physics is both a mathematical and an experimental science.
- Use the main ideas of classical mechanics (kinematics, dynamics, and conservation principles), special relativity, and electricity & magnetism to solve fundamental and applied problems.