Physics at Sussex

Anyone know what its like? Im really interested, i got the prospectus the other day and ive fallen in love with the place. Especially that study oportunity abroad, iceland all the way for me!

Reply 1

helpme1

Hello,

I'm studying Physics at Sussex and if I had known a few things before applying I might have thought twice, I'm not trying to put you off, it is a good Uni I just wish I'd done a bit more research.

1. The "Matlab" course. As far as we can tell its not "taught" at any other Uni and not even used in at Sussex by the lecturers etc, after year one we never see it again yet its worth 12 credits this term..... None of us have any idea what the hell is going on yet we get tested each week which counts for 10% its causing me a huge amount of stress at the moment!!

2. MASTERING PHYSICS www.masteringphysics.com , My year are being used as the pilot study for this. Its an online coursework assesser type thing. It sucks. You have to type in really long equations, make one typing mistake and you loose 3%! I lost 12% today because I put in "r__vec" instead of "r_vec" by accident. I think most people have complained but theres nothing they can do this year.

University of Sussex

Brighton

Reply 2

SussexJo

Just a slight aside - if you have any problems with your course you should contact your student rep if you have one and Sophie McGlinn, the USSU Education Officer ([email protected]). They campaign to improve courses and teaching.

Jo x

Reply 3

MartinP

helpme1

1. The "Matlab" course. As far as we can tell its not "taught" at any other Uni and not even used in at Sussex by the lecturers etc, after year one we never see it again yet its worth 12 credits this term..... None of us have any idea what the hell is going on yet we get tested each week which counts for 10% its causing me a huge amount of stress at the moment!!

My housemate did astrophysics at sussex and used Matlab on a couple of courses in the second/third years and also on her final year project.

As far as I am aware most if not all physics courses teach a Mathematical modelling tool like Matlab or Maple or a programming language like C or Fortran.

I used Matlab alot in my Artificial Intelligence courses and found it difficult to start with but after a while I found it quite easy to use. It probably is more difficult if you don't have a background in programming though.

Reply 4

helpme1

I know I don't use matlab after this year, we go on to "maple". It's not that matlab is difficult to use its that the questions keep taking massive jumps away from each other in difficulty and the way its taught is really strange. Don't really want to go into it here as it would take to long. I don't bother with reps etc anymore as we tried all that last year with our awful circuits course and absolutely nothing got done about it.