Way to bury the lede there—you’re not “unsure”, you’re too easily daunted by mathematics.
You should stop running away from things that challenge you, and figure out how to enjoy the math that you’ve been getting stuck on. Look at it as a concrete example of the general life skill of improving yourself, if you like. It’s 2025; we are right this moment in the sweet spot of LLMs being cheaper than they’ll probably end up eventually (remember Uber and Lyft pricing back when they were new?), so you have a superintelligent tutor in your pocket that can do literally anything you can imagine to make maths more approachable.
Got a favorite fandom? I’ll bet any modern LLM can write decent fiction of it where your favorite characters learn and use the math you’re trying to wrap your head around. Prefer learning by examples? It’ll make you more examples than you’ve got time to read. Want to learn by listening to humans chat about it? notebooklm generates podcasts, or any of them can help direct you toward human-created content that matches your exact preferences. I don’t know what the fix will be for you, but I know that tackling your actual problem and figuring out how to pass classes you start off hating will improve the ecosystem of your overall capabilities far more than any major switch you could do right now.
If you solve your problem with math and still hate your major, then you can pivot into something else with the new life skill of working around problem classes in order to pursue your goals. If you don’t solve your problem with math now, you’ll see yourself being the kind of person who runs and hides when tasks get difficult which will reinforce that as part of your self-image, and you also probably won’t get as wealthy and successful as you would in the timelines where you prioritize the skill of numeracy.
You are correct. Part of me also fears mathematics as a subject, especially calculus. Like I mentioned in the other comment, I don’t necessarily see myself pursuing something related towards numeracy, or technology even by that matters. However, I do want to pursuit something that will allow me to sustain myself in the current world.
Thank you so much for your advice and help. You are right. Fear will weaken me, and it’s important to be able to combat it, especially now-a-days.
There will be times when fear is telling you something correct and actionable, and should be heeded.
There will be many, many times when fear is telling you lies.
This is one of many opportunities to practice telling the difference.
I hope that math gives you a chance to see yourself overcome a personal challenge—observation shapes self-perception, and I think it’s better to perceive oneself as capable of overcoming hard things than otherwise.
The funny thing about numeracy is that it does double duty in the modern era: First, it scares away so many people that competition is reduced for certain jobs, and in turn, compensation tends to be higher for them.
Second and much more relevantly, slogging through calculus teaches you to notice certain categories of problem and form expectations about how their answers should look. You don’t have to keep on doing calculus once you’ve figured out how to use it, just like you don’t have to keep on taking driver’s ed class once you’ve gotten your license. But having a background in higher math—get through basic calculus and also give formal logic a shot; it’s a radically different flavor and can be much more palatable for some—can make it feel natural and obvious to stay on the correct side of compound interest at all times, which is critical for comfortably sustaining oneself in the current world. Money is math; financial instruments are math. Salary negotiation, like “should I push for higher base compensation or a bigger sign-on bonus or stock, and how does this depend on the type of stock”, is a form of math problem that tricks people into choosing lower over higher total compensation very frequently.
I hope that you can choose the path for yourself where you do not have to live in fear, nor wonder how much better things could have been if you’d just been a little braver. And if you want to commiserate about math, you’re welcome to mail me or whatever—it was my least favorite subject in school and I’ve failed many classes in it over the years, but the tech for finding interesting snippets of it and knitting them together into better general knowledge has improved vastly since I was in university.
If that’s somethin you want to work on, that’s excellent. Math is useful, and can be a lot of fun even if it doesn’t come naturally to you. Consider carefully whether a classroom is the best place for you to learn it. It might be. It might not.
Way to bury the lede there—you’re not “unsure”, you’re too easily daunted by mathematics.
You should stop running away from things that challenge you, and figure out how to enjoy the math that you’ve been getting stuck on. Look at it as a concrete example of the general life skill of improving yourself, if you like. It’s 2025; we are right this moment in the sweet spot of LLMs being cheaper than they’ll probably end up eventually (remember Uber and Lyft pricing back when they were new?), so you have a superintelligent tutor in your pocket that can do literally anything you can imagine to make maths more approachable.
Got a favorite fandom? I’ll bet any modern LLM can write decent fiction of it where your favorite characters learn and use the math you’re trying to wrap your head around. Prefer learning by examples? It’ll make you more examples than you’ve got time to read. Want to learn by listening to humans chat about it? notebooklm generates podcasts, or any of them can help direct you toward human-created content that matches your exact preferences. I don’t know what the fix will be for you, but I know that tackling your actual problem and figuring out how to pass classes you start off hating will improve the ecosystem of your overall capabilities far more than any major switch you could do right now.
If you solve your problem with math and still hate your major, then you can pivot into something else with the new life skill of working around problem classes in order to pursue your goals. If you don’t solve your problem with math now, you’ll see yourself being the kind of person who runs and hides when tasks get difficult which will reinforce that as part of your self-image, and you also probably won’t get as wealthy and successful as you would in the timelines where you prioritize the skill of numeracy.
You are correct. Part of me also fears mathematics as a subject, especially calculus. Like I mentioned in the other comment, I don’t necessarily see myself pursuing something related towards numeracy, or technology even by that matters. However, I do want to pursuit something that will allow me to sustain myself in the current world.
Thank you so much for your advice and help. You are right. Fear will weaken me, and it’s important to be able to combat it, especially now-a-days.
There will be times when fear is telling you something correct and actionable, and should be heeded.
There will be many, many times when fear is telling you lies.
This is one of many opportunities to practice telling the difference.
I hope that math gives you a chance to see yourself overcome a personal challenge—observation shapes self-perception, and I think it’s better to perceive oneself as capable of overcoming hard things than otherwise.
The funny thing about numeracy is that it does double duty in the modern era: First, it scares away so many people that competition is reduced for certain jobs, and in turn, compensation tends to be higher for them.
Second and much more relevantly, slogging through calculus teaches you to notice certain categories of problem and form expectations about how their answers should look. You don’t have to keep on doing calculus once you’ve figured out how to use it, just like you don’t have to keep on taking driver’s ed class once you’ve gotten your license. But having a background in higher math—get through basic calculus and also give formal logic a shot; it’s a radically different flavor and can be much more palatable for some—can make it feel natural and obvious to stay on the correct side of compound interest at all times, which is critical for comfortably sustaining oneself in the current world. Money is math; financial instruments are math. Salary negotiation, like “should I push for higher base compensation or a bigger sign-on bonus or stock, and how does this depend on the type of stock”, is a form of math problem that tricks people into choosing lower over higher total compensation very frequently.
I hope that you can choose the path for yourself where you do not have to live in fear, nor wonder how much better things could have been if you’d just been a little braver. And if you want to commiserate about math, you’re welcome to mail me or whatever—it was my least favorite subject in school and I’ve failed many classes in it over the years, but the tech for finding interesting snippets of it and knitting them together into better general knowledge has improved vastly since I was in university.
If that’s somethin you want to work on, that’s excellent. Math is useful, and can be a lot of fun even if it doesn’t come naturally to you. Consider carefully whether a classroom is the best place for you to learn it. It might be. It might not.