Ah.
Leaping straight into MST121 and MS221 was difficult, and required more thinking from me than on any subsequent course.
That's because the jump from my then current knowledge to what was expected of me on MST121 and MS221 was comparatively huge. While the subsequent courses MST209 and M208 were much more advanced than MS221, the comparative leap up wasn't so great when compared to the chasm that is a long-forgotten O level and MST121.
And that's because all I could essentially remember of "maths" from school was fractions and percentages. I couldn't even remember what a surd was, or how to solve a linear equation.
Hence, I was in for a rude shock upon embarking on MST121 and MS221 with their calculus, affine transformations, conics, complex numbers, number theory, etc.
So, there are two ways of thinking about this:
Either it was a foolhardy risk, and I would have been better off starting with MU120 as it was then, or it turned out to pay dividends by stretching my grey matter from day one.
It would certainly seem odd to the average outsider that I scored in the high 80s in most MS221 assignments, yet managed a raft of perfect 100s on MST209 - but I firmly attribute that to stretching myself by taking MST121 rather than MU120 as my first course.
If I re-did it all, I'd still have opted for MST121 over MU120, but would send a message back in time to expect to roughly double the number of hours I expected to put in.