AEA Mathematics 25/06 2013 Thread

Although we did have one lecture which started with Pythagoras' theorem / cosine rule and ended with Russell's Paradox in the first week. It might've been Liebeck... maybe they stopped that

At the end of my 1st week in Cambridge, our Director of Studies thought it would be a useful idea to run a Sunday tutorial session to get us into the swing of things! One girl objected on religious grounds as she was quite a devout Christian, but the rest of us traipsed off to the old DPMMS building for a couple of hours on the Sunday afternoon!

That's the sort of dedication we need to see

But you haven't learnt anything in the first week! Which college was this?

Well, we were young and didn't know any better

It's obviously too long ago now for me to remember exactly what we did that day, but I'm sure it was only a gentle introduction to things!

Mind you, our DoS adopted the policy of setting past Tripos questions for supervisions, rather than using the lecturers' example sheets, so we may even have been shown a couple of "real" questions as a sort of shock tactic!

Was this at Churchill by any chance? ukdragon mentioned some crazy stuff the Computing DoS did there, was it a college thing?

If you did past papers during term, does that mean you aced all the exams as you knew all the stuff come revision?

It wasn't Churchill - I won't mention the actual college as the DoS is still there!!

I certainly didn't ace the exams, and as one of my fellow students pointed out, the example sheet questions actually go beyond the level of Tripos questions, so it's a bit of a debatable policy - a bit like only doing A level past papers without understanding the harder questions in the book - but I've no idea how it compares to other colleges in terms of overall success rate!