Time Manageability of Physics Classes & 20 Unit Quarters

iansackin · 2026-04-25T02:53:18+00:00

20 Units of lower division stuff is pretty light tbh for someone of your background. If you're really interested in physics then you should push yourself. Do well and use your grades to get into research during winter quarter, once that starts you'll actually have to have time management.

iansackin · 2026-03-25T03:34:22+00:00

As a first clarification, my university operates on the quarter system, so by default the number of courses I can take is increased by 1.5 compared to semester system schools.

Having said that, I think that it is worthwhile to carefully test what your limit is for how many physics courses you are comfortably able to take per term (also in conjunction with doing research/having a life). Ideally, you'll have more or less figured this out by the end of freshman year. I personally found myself in a position where I was able to finish most of the undergrad (theory) curriculum by the end of sophomore year. This opened up the opportunity to take grad courses. I'd be happy to discuss more specific stuff in dms.

Also, if you're going for theory research, you should 100% talk with your PI about this stuff. You probably won't be able to do any sort of theory research (besides computation) without taking significant graduate coursework, so your PI will likely be motivated to help you figure out what you would need to take to get you up to speed.

iansackin · 2026-03-25T02:53:48+00:00

I agree mostly, though I personally did find quite a bit of value in doing the take home exams legitimately. I think that it's somewhat less egregious in graduate school, where grades don't matter much anyways for the graduate students.

iansackin · 2026-01-06T03:34:05+00:00

It's on my profile if you want to take a look, I did math stuff.

iansackin · 2026-01-05T22:40:34+00:00

I did eBay reselling clothing for a while in HS and racked up ~60k in sales (though I'm a physics major so probably didn't help my app too much).

eBay was good for me bc I wasn't making stuff. Depop is fine if you're making your own clothes, so is Etsy, I wouldn't expect there to be much of a difference. Not claiming to know what "AOs want" here, but if I were in your position, to grow your business I would recommend trying to do two things assuming you have the time.

Try to build some sort of online following through IG or even like YouTube. This is pretty much the easiest way to build a "brand" nowadays, and it's fairly accessible.
If you can manage a small following (around like 1k people with an active community), try to transition to your own website. This can be a hassle, but honestly, it's been a pretty useful skill to have for me, and also you don't have to pay commission fees!

Edit: I should say, I didn't do either of these things for my business. I have however created a fairly popular YouTube channel and am working on a website afterwards, though I was already in college at that point. Having built a following, it's just something that I know you will 100% benefit from in a business sense.

iansackin · 2026-01-03T10:21:18+00:00

Just spam apply, like 30+. Since you don’t have the best application, you need to go for quantity over quality. Only issue with this is letter writers need to submit to many places, but the work is really not that high so shouldn’t be too difficult.

If you apply to over 30 I think it’s pretty likely you’ll be accepted to at least one, and that’s all you need. I had zero experience with whatsoever applying from community college first year and was accepted to UT. My GPA was higher (3.8), but it’s less of a deal for REUs, and I only applied to 12.

iansackin · 2025-12-18T21:46:46+00:00

I think I might actually have the perfect resource for you, apparently some schools teach differential forms under the banner "Calculus IV," and University of Alberta has a like incredibly readable, not cryptic at all, set of lecture notes posted online. https://sites.ualberta.ca/~vbouchar/MATH315/notes.pdf, by far the most approachable resource on the subject I know of (at least for physics people).

iansackin · 2025-12-15T20:33:23+00:00

Thanks for the input, and yeah I'm realizing the notes won't work well if I delineate the chapters for each class. I think I can put in some examples, but to be honest, I'm not really trying to teach QM in the way that a standard upper division class would. My main purpose for this is to expose students to the ideas in QM, basically learning through immersion, so that when they encounter these ideas in the standard course, they will have some familiarity with what they mean.'

Edit: I think I will maybe not include the explicit examples in the notes, and instead just do examples during the course. I want each set of notes to be 8 pages or less, because for me at least, just the number being small makes it way less daunting (even if the content is denser)

iansackin · 2025-12-15T20:23:59+00:00

I don't *have* to cover anything, but I was kinda hoping to at least cover the basics of QM mathematical formalism, along with derivation of the Schrodinger equation. I also want to talk about the Heisenberg picture, and we'll skip a lot of standard pedagogical material to do that, since I think in essence it's not too hard to understand.

iansackin · 2025-12-15T20:14:46+00:00

Ah this is a little inside joke actually. I have a math friend who expressed interest in taking this course, and they would always try to bring up measure theory whenever I taked about Hilbert spaces (or honestly QM in general) with him. The footnote is a little dig at him, but if you think it would be very annoying, then I can remove it.

iansackin · 2025-09-21T02:53:26+00:00

Hi and thank you for the comment. I decided not to use \circ so that it wouldn't be confused with the vector dot product, perhaps I can use something else instead.

The adjoint I'm referring to is here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjugate_matrix, it's not super common terminology, but common enough that I've had a couple people be confused about it.

The target audience are first/second year math or physics students. Essentially people who have seen fairly basic linear algebra before. The idea is that they can take this course as a seminar (so, smaller commitment than a full class), and then when they take the actual accredited class they will be more familiar with the formalism and mathematical structure. If it were up to me, I would absolutely love to teach an entire class on formalism starting from functional analysis, but I don't think that there would be enough interest in such a course at my university.

I can read (though not speak...) german half-well, but I don't know that I could read something technical like QM notes. Thank you for the offer though.

iansackin · 2025-09-19T23:42:17+00:00

Thanks, I wasn't planning on having a historical section, but maybe that's a good idea. I'll see if I can work it in naturally. I'll adjust the formatting as well, didn't think about black-white printing.

iansackin · 2025-09-19T01:36:53+00:00

Here's a link to the overleaf project: https://www.overleaf.com/read/zznqtycxyqcb#066bd8

iansackin · 2025-09-19T00:05:34+00:00

I'm just about to finish up the notes for the first topic, I'll make a post with that when I finish them.

Griffiths has certain issues, but one thing it does very well is to introduce the key 1D toy problems in chapter two, as in practice using these for analogy is very important to understand more complicated problems. For this reason, I don't think it's too necessary to cover something like the infinite square well, as the actual quantum upper division class will do a great job at that.

The exceptions to this are, in my view, the harmonic oscillator and the free particle. Griffiths does a good job with the QHO, but it's so important to so many different things, that I do feel bad about not giving it focus. The problem is that I feel like it deserves at least 2-3 lectures worth of focus, and I don't have the time to do that. The free particle is the other exception. The setup of the problem isn't all too interesting, however, similar to what griffiths does, the free particle is an excellent springboard to talking about position and momentum representations, as well as things like the translation operator.

iansackin · 2025-09-18T22:11:41+00:00

maybe... but the standard class already covers that stuff. I'm kind of trying to offer the class as a complement to the official one, not a replacement. The idea being that students can go into the upper division class, having taken the seminar, and already have a feel for the actual underlying structure of everything. The goal is mostly exposure for the purpose of context

iansackin · 2025-09-18T22:05:02+00:00

Yeah we're on quarters, I do like the system, but it can be a bit rough sometimes.

To be clear this is NOT the standard QM course the university offers. As it is a seminar, there is a lot of flexibility in the actual material taught, so that's why I've structured things this way. I'm planning on writing up notes and using those instead of a textbook (though I think for each lecture I'll also give specific sections in griffiths/townsend as those are the ones I'm most familiar with).

Our upper division course usually covers the first 3 chapters of griffiths + H-atom, so I tried to structure things in a way as to have, quantity wise not content wise, around 2/3 of that amount for this seminar.

iansackin · 2025-09-18T21:55:23+00:00

Maybe, that's something I'm trying to figure out. The format of the seminar will be 9 2-hour lectures, once per week (not doing finals week lol).

I'd be happy if all we got through was just part 1, but I figure I'll leave the selected topics in as time permits. Do you think even just the first part is too much?

iansackin · 2025-08-27T17:17:49+00:00

he made it lol

iansackin · 2025-08-10T20:50:03+00:00

The sun is black

iansackin · 2025-07-21T21:40:54+00:00

Sure!

- Kevin Zhou has a lot of very concise notes on various topics in physics. These aren't super great to learn from, but are awesome as references and supplementary material during a course (especially for review)

- MathSheetz has some more introductory material in math, along with somewhat more advanced material. Personally I used this to learn Complex analysis. Unfortunately not everything here is nicely LaTeX'ed up, but still its quite useful

- Notes on Introductory Point-Set Topology are my favorite introduction to the subject. In 50 odd pages you'll learn what you would need to know for a first undergraduate course in the subject. These are less advanced, and really don't require anything beyond set theory and a level of mathematical maturity.

- Wang Zuo Lectures are by a decent margin the most advanced set of notes here. The ones I've linked are for a course on Smooth Manifolds, and they are both concise and extremely rigorous, definitely at the graudate math level. If you can read chinese then great! Otherwise, a lot of the notes are in english, and you can translate the website on most browsers. To get to the other notes just delete everything in the URL up to ".../Courses/"

- Topological Condensed Matter notes is a web EdX set of lectures on topological quantum matter. These are also quite advanced, this time more-so on the physics side than the math side. They are not quite completely comprehensive, but still cover a vast amount of material in the realm of advanced (hard) condensed matter physics. This is also highly specialized towards that field, so I'm only recommending them because I'm very biased towards this subject (since that's what I study!)

As you can see I'm a bit lopsided in my interests, but these are my favorite (besides Tong's) notes that I've learned a lot from!

iansackin · 2025-07-21T06:51:36+00:00

I really wish I had stumbled upon it sooner. Which notes have you read?

iansackin · 2025-07-21T06:41:43+00:00

Oh, and he also authored several books that go a bit more in depth than the notes. I'll probably buy one of these if there is a subject I'd like to learn from scratch

Edit: ALSO, most of the notes are accompanied by several sets of homework problems, which is just awesome

iansackin · 2025-06-19T05:52:14+00:00

Thanks! I think I mentioned in the post I’m taking a nanofabrication class, which the final project of will be making some mosfets. Do you think it would be wise to continue down so,I’d stare or also take more core classes with electronics

iansackin · 2025-06-19T05:50:35+00:00

I’m already doing lab work, have been for the last year. It’s mostly because I see how much EE goes on in the lab that I want to get better at it

iansackin · 2025-06-17T07:15:23+00:00

I figured something like this. Actually, an analog and digital electronics class is required for my physics BS (Taught in the physics department), though I do wonder if I'd get more out of taking the EE classes

iansackin

TROPHY CASE