I Hate Astrophysics 

its okay jeff, the adsense money from this video might be enough to eat one cheap burger for the day

Look man if a professor told me "im good to go" and then proceeded to give me a 78%...... the emails would be biblical

This isn't an astrophysics problem, this is a teaching one

That was incredibly irresponsible and unfair of the professor and that's putting it lightly.

The 3.797 was brutal to process 💀

Its just so crazy that she waited until the actual presentation was happening to give feedback instead of giving feedback when you asked for feedback

If Astrophysics is so good, then why haven’t they made Astrophysics 2??

You need to talk to the dean/chair, whichever applies. This is clearly a case of targeted unfair grading, and maybe even attempted exploitation in terms of you unknowingly advancing her own research.

Some professors are actual monsters, not gonna lie.

as an asparing mechanical engineer, a "basic understanding of calculus 3..." hurt me like an insult to my mother.

I feel like you were saying: "But wait, it gets worse" for 12 minutes straight

Recent astrophysics grad here... on behalf of the rest of us in the field, I am so fuckin sorry. If it makes you feel any better, I dropped a course really similar to this called Galaxy Evolution during my master's because even after getting a whole ass bachelor's degree in the field, I still had no fuckin clue what was going on. It'll be okay, Jeff :)

In winemaking college, one of my professors had bred a couple grape varietals and had a PhD in dirt sciences. Anyways, in our first viticulture class we had to write a report on a certain grape varietal. After we picked, the professor said "I pity any of you that chose L'Acadie Blanc" as that's the varietal she literally invented lol

as someone who had a 3.749 before the last semester causing me to not get graduation honors announced at the cerimony even though I increased it to 3.77 that semester I understand the gpa gripe

At least in my university, you have grounds ro appeal the grade she gave. You could cite the entrapment and the inconformity with the rubric as a case for a biased assessment of your work and solicit an independent review of your presentation for a fairer grade from another professor in that area. Obviously a ton of asterisks depending on the regulations of your university.

Damn you astrophysics professor was absolutely diabolical

This video make me cry. Not just because of the professors bait, but also because 78% was said to be a low grade...

The "professor saying something is good to go, then ripping into your project plus grading harshly" feels like my experience with stem class in college, as a person who mostly did non stem subjects (econ, history and archaeology). In my non stem classes if a professor gave feedback prior to the final submission and you made changes, the lowest you could get was an A-. In stem classes it felt like professors just decided that it's a good learning tactic to hide info and spring it during or after the final submission, even with talking to them prior.

"How does the [techno babble] work"? sounds like if someone presented on the commodore 64 and then the professor asked what each pin and instruction on the 6502 does

It's like the most interesting sounding physics when you're young, then you find it's the most annoying one mathematically.

Jeff hates astrophysics because the intelligence required to create his masterful illustrations makes it look like child’s play. Astrophysics? The stars stay in the same place every night, why would you calculate how they move?

This is why I became a niche internet noise musician and professional jackass instead of an astrophysicist

Man, my dumb CompSci major brain cant understand these hard math and science words

God I LOVE MAJORING IN ASTROPHYSICS I LOVE MAJORING IN ASTROPHYSICS I LOVE MAJORING IN ASTROPHYSICS

I took a star formations class last semester as a high energy physics masters student, and I had a very similar experience. It’s crazy how easily physics branches off into dozens of mutually unintelligible fields.

I'm an astro major. I'm amazed you never encountered professors like this in your physics classes. A lot of my university's physics and astrophysics professors are like this. It is a shame but definitely not a thing unique to astro. This is a real problem in physics as a whole and departments need to work on it.

0:52 Defending the decision to require real analysis: if your college didnt have a dedicated "intro to proofs" course this is likely one of the first classes that makes you write rigorous proofs (the other common choice is discrete math, which is probably even less relevant for a physics major), which is a heavily required skill for any higher level math course. Likely if you took these classes without real analysis or similarly leveled mathematical background the pacing would've been too fast since you aren't used to it. Also, real analysis gives you the rigor of calculus (mostly differentiation) which allows you to treat all those subjects that as you said may just require calc knowledge, but that's just for knowing what the machinery is, which is probably enough for a physicist, but not for a mathematician (likely the main audience of these courses). I took a grad diff geo class, and if I never took the second real analysis course I probably would have died 3 weeks in, nevermind the first one. Math majors don't just study how to use mathematical objects, they need to be able to reason with them and prove properties etc. (Lmao sorry for the rant I just think about this/have this convo a lot as a physics math double)

On today's episode of JEFF GETS SCAMMED: Joins astrophysics class, gets his cheeks clapped by harsh grading Will he survive the course? Find out in this episode!

Ok, you can't fool me anymore, this is just casually explained's voice

This is karmic justice for believing that physics has nothing to do with real analysis

The thing about analysis is that it’s generally also the introduction to proofs for most math majors and while technically you could learn the other topics with just calc III. They aren’t going to ask you what is the answer, they are going to tell you to prove that the statement is true for all values. It’s not the fact that you need to go back and understand calc I-III it’s that you need to have a formal and rigorous understanding of logic, proofs and mathematical structures. A mat 300 course is about understanding the math and not just learning it.

Some professors are just insane in their expectations. I had a professor who was absolutely obsessed with electronics that it got me worried, but he repeatedly gave us sympathetic stories about blacking out during exams, getting confused and that it's all not a big deal and as long as we attended the lectures we would be able to at least pass. The preparation exams were also kind of easy. Unfortunately I couldn't attend the first real exam because I got sick but I still got to see the results... 60% failed, average grade D In a footnote the professor told us to repeat some basic math, like real basic and I thought "huh maybe they were just being morons" They weren't... On the repeat exam I got to truly see why so many people failed. We got 4 huge tasks with multiple sub questions, one of which was analyzing a huge voltage controlled oscillator, which we did not cover in depth and one set of random smaller questions and *not even 75 minutes to solve it all* This time 75% failed and the average grade was "E+" I guess, so less than 50% of all possible points. Btw I failed, too. No one, not a single student solved the VCO task correctly. I'm not repeating this class until this guy gets replaced.

I took one year of college and still regret it to this day. My favorite subject was programming but the teacher completely ruined it for me

idk man i kinda like astrophysics but i guess everyone's tastes in music are different

I've had similar experiences with professors whenever my research got anywhere near their specialty. Thankfully, as a humanities major, I got pretty good at figuring out what their interpretational framework was, what subject areas they were knowledgeable about, and only acknowledge the assigned topic just enough to an opposing framework with completely unfamiliar subject matter.

I don't study anything similar to physics, but I go to a "top" university in my country and what's funny is that I got so used to this kind of treatment that when you listed all the things your professor had inflicted onto you, I was like: ok and??? Because the three years I have been here, I have had assignments without marking rubrics, not enough time for assignments, last minute changes to classes and tasks, little to no teaching support... I had one lecturer that didn't even respond to me asking him for proper feedback for my essay, which was composed of a few highlights and question marks. I've always chalked it up to lecturers not being paid enough or given enough time, but I guess I should have been fighting against that.

At least you got a group. For my final project for Real-Time Machine Learning, the group member I was going to work with bailed on me to join another group, so I was SOL. So I decided to try to improve one of my older projects with much larger images (48x48 -> 640x480). At several points during the project, I completely exhausted my GPU memory (RTX 3060 w/ 8 GB RAM) and I had to switch to PyTorch from Tensorflow, but I managed to get top marks for the project (95%).

In the academic field we refer to this as a skill issue

I think you're at my school and as a math major here, the fact that the math classes are locked behind real analysis is a mercy given how the professors grade. Theres a grad physics math toolkit course which might be useful for you bc honestly its probably the more effective way to cover algebra and topology for physics majors. It's also the only class that does Lie stuff.

I relate with this so much, during my second semester I did the same shit picking an industrial design class as a graphic design major, thankfully the class was specifically about blue printing stuff for ID work but it felt so weird being the only non ID Major in the class, and made me learn how bad I am at drawing with perspective

8:37 "Looks good" is what she said What she was thinking was "yep there's plenty of content in this presentation to follow up on once he asks for questions" Then she performed the vibe check and you fumbled the bag. I know from experience that you can't make a single mistake with these things, bc the professors will exploit it. You gotta sniff these kind of professors out early so you can put them in check when it really matters Also, my condolences about the scholarship.

Great seeing you post Jeff, You've been one of the most funniest channels I've found of all time

i applaud you for not bursting in rage at any point in the video

That happened to a friend of mine at school. He was in a group with two other guys. One of them was his friend and the other was an oddball guy. We needed to write a 25 page report with 25 sources and then give a presentation on it. The two guys did all the work in the paper, then during the presentation the oddball guy was late (as he usually was) the two guys were competent though the professor would stop them mid presentation to ask about certain images because that was the subject of her research. At one point the oddball guy when asked basically said that the subject of their research was not their research. I really felt for them. I went after them and we did really well and our classmates weren't bored during our presentation.

Brings back memories for me, did a Physics/Astrophysics dual major back in the 1980s. What you went through isn’t uncommon, same BS, different eras, lots of profs love to pull the bait and switch when it comes to class research topics. I had a 4th year independent study course in Astrophysics(not core to my degree), was told on the syllabus I could pick my own research topic and be supervised by the course instructor. I chose the topic to be the study of the cataclysmic variable star Eta Carinae, even had an outline sketched out for our first meeting. Got to the meeting with the course prof. and he was waiting at his desk with a thick folder of paper. I told him I had worked out an initial topic outline for the course as requested. He looked a little put out, he then grumbled that he had picked out a topic for me already, it was on Planetary Nebulae and it was part of his current research program. He wanted me to do some data analysis on some new observational data he had acquired. In essence he wanted me to be an unpaid research assistant doing work for him for free. What? I thought we were allowed to choose our own topics? He bluntly told me if I went ahead with my own topic he couldn’t provide any ‘help’ to me. It was also hinted my final grade would not be all that great. I was told to think it over, I left that meeting, walked straight over to the Registrar’s and dropped the course. Another student taking the course was more flexible, he went along with it, worked his ass off and got an A as payment for his efforts. Almost 40 years later and I still don’t regret doing what I did, research assistants were paid positions and I was being asked to work for free in exchange for grades, that didn’t and still doesn’t sit well with me.

As an Aspiring astrophysicist this videos makes me feel excited to start my classes! Definitely..

Man, that's how you end up turning in a research paper dedicated to how terrible every aspect of your professor's teaching methods are.

I sympathise. My own experience was a required world history blue book exam. Background: physics/math major, love history. The class: required all majors undergrad cattle herd, 350-ish classmates. Randomly chosen topic from pool of unique topics. How do you prep for such an exam? Day of test: I draw the question "Discuss inflationary fluctuations of the 14th century florin". I draw a sigh of relief: I had drawn a topic I knew something about. Wax eloquent I did. No fluff, every line incisive, no repetition. Feverishly I wrote, even calling for a second blue book and I write small. My grade: D-, with a penned note from the surely hell-bound grad student who graded it; to wit "get serious about your studies". My love of history survived intact, but will spit a parting curse upon grad students from my deathbed.

Yeah Astrophysics sucks too, very complex and somewhat hard to grasp. But basically what you need to know is…. When you’re going very fast in a spaceship, you use the gravitational orbit of a planet to SLINGSHOT yourself very far!

I'd be livid too in this situation. Thankfully my astrophysics professor was super chill when I took the class with her (shout-out to Dr. B!). Depending on the university, you could elevate this to the head of the physics department and request a manual grade override. We had a professor at my college who routinely failed his students on the final exam only for the head of the department to automatically override that grade with an A. It's not the best approach, but at least it guarantees students don't get screwed over due to a vindictive professor.

Was your voice always this deep?

In my third year of undergrad, I participated in a big competition that took me and my teammates all our summer and the first half of the fall semester. At the end of the project, every team (350 teams in total from all over the world) would fly to the US to present their projects and receive the results. In preparation for our week in the US, we asked our professors to move midterms when they overlapped with the week in the US, and they were all very cool about it. Except my machine learning professor. When i approached him about it, he firs ttold me that he couldn’t allow me to take the midterm at a later date and that all my grade would have to rely on the final. I was okay with that, tho i gave me no margin of error for the final, but i could live with it. So we went to the US, presented our projects, and actually ended up winning the first prize, becoming the first team from our country to win first prize in the 20 years since the competition had been founded. So we came back to school obviously very late in our studying but proud of ourselves, and we worked extra hard to catch up for the midterms that had been postponed. But as I come back, my machine learning professor intercepts me and tells that he changed his mind, and that I would actually need to take the midterm the following week, as it would “be unfair to the others if all my grade was the final”. I obviously hadn’t studied one bit for that so I looked at him in disbelief and told him “I don’t actually need the credits from your course, so no thanks.” Went to the academic services and dropped the course right then and there.

And this is why I make a habit of reading through school policies and procedures, so that I can dunk on teachers right back when they pull stuff like that. I also keep my phone on audio record 24/7 when I'm outside my house which I know people hate but by god does it solve problems like this so quickly.

Not taking real analysis is a skill issue

Astro requires you to wear a lot of hats. I skirted this in my undergrad degree by focusing on relativity. That way I didn’t need geology, chemistry, and a host of other fields. All said, tensors were not too bad after diffy q’s and vector calculus (coming from a guy NOT gifted in math), and GR was really fun to learn about.

Truly the physics moment of all time

That sounds like a hell of an ego trip by the professor

My man I really respect Physics students. I study/ struggle English and History and all you need to know for those things is how to read. Could not imagine your pain so best of luck on your journey.

Honestly you are really good at describing space and physics things with the CGM description.

I am a aerospace major and in Europe so maybe our grades scale differently but a 78% is pretty banging, like aside from a few outliers most of my class would be happy with that grade, especially after being torn to shreds. The only time I had a group presentation torn into we got a 6/10 and that was just barely a pass.

To be a professor is to never be held accountable for your bad decisions.

Just a minor point as a recovering graduate student: you can often skip math course prerequisites by reaching out to the professor who teaches the course. If you're a non-major, chances are they'll let you take their course or at least audit it just for the satisfaction of knowing that someone outside of the department gives a shit about what they're teaching.

I have been having fond memories of college and wishing I could go back. My PTSD has been reawakened and I am no loner wishing I could go back. Thank you

Just got recommended your video after what feels like years. Very cool.

I'm a third year studying physics and in my university real analysis one and real analysis two were mandatory subjects(these two subjects gave me way better understanding of calculus then any actual calculus class),also differential equations,complex analysis and vector/tensor calculus Next semester I will be learning elements of topology and differential geometry along with field theory and quantum mechanics All in all physics major feels like most of what you are taught is math

I feel ya man. I had a class called Math Methods that prepares you for higher-physics by teaching you relevant material. However, the professor did very similar things to yours and always criticize how "American students just don't try" because we didn't get these topics. I was one of like 3 in the class who actually understood what was happening. Fortunately, I'm his TA this semester and will be helping him work with the next year of students with my support and feedback. He's receptive to adjustment, but you can tell he's at our university for research and not for teaching.

this gave me flashbacks cuz' that's essentially how half of my professors behaved in one of the universities I went too, why is this so common and accepted in academia god damn

I love astrophysics for one reason: it's a great insult to tell someone to go into Astrophysics. It's basically a way to tell someone they're good at taking up time and space.

so for the CGM question, my guess of radiation pressure was technically correct? just instead of EM radiation, its sound radiation

5:55 to be precise... You don't see the shockwaves of jet fighters unless you are really close, then you might see a very thin distorted line because of the high pressure zone. What you are talking about as a vapour cone that is formed because of water vapour condensing in low pressure areas which don't even require super sonic speeds

5:30 hey you made an error here, positive particles don’t repel negative particles

Im in my fourth year of my physics degree and listening to you talk about the difficulties of trying to plan electives was so real, and somehow the astrophysics professors at my school sound similarly terrible. I had a computational physics course taught by an astronomy prof and all the assignments and examples in class he used astronomy situations so none of the physics or math majors could never understand what was going on

I was SOOOOOO ready for this video

damn that sucks! your teacher is a real piece a work. from the way you described your first class I'm still impressed with how well you seem to have done in the end tho.

honestly this was a great video man keep it up.

I can highly relate to this experiences, As a freshman in my undergrad going for my psycology degree, I ended saw a course called behavior and neuobology. I had the same expreience being in a class full of seniors and all of them had already taken a neuro biology, and I failed my first test and promplty droped that class because I wasn't going to make it through.

This video makes me grateful to be in software engineering

Me as a dutch student where the literal only requirement to admission to anthing is "you've passed the previous step" be like. "Passing grade is a passing grade what are y'all ppl on about?"

Had a similar thing happen to me with a presentation but luckily the professor was nice enough about me disregarding a primary field of research for them. Always check what your professors are researching. Always.

Yeah that's one thing about my physics lectures that annoys me so much they expect me in first year to be an expert in the field

Had a similar thing happen to me at my uni, not to the same biblically damnable extent as what happened you but definitely infuriating none the less. Some of these profs are egotistical bastards who want nothing more than to see their students suffer man. Keep strong brother

As a astrophysics graduate I can say that this is basically the whole experience and sadly you just kinda "have to get used to this" and thats all you can do

i feel you man, this shit sucks. i had to do a final project for my lab about the topic of doping and semicondoctors while having exactly 0 background in solid state physics, shit killed me

This needs more engagement

My college has two astrophysics classes: astrophysics 1 and 2. I took the first last year and it was literally the hardest class I've ever taken. I'm taking the 2nd this year...

“I’m a physics major” Why would you torture yourself like that? Alternatively Oh, so you’re a masochist

This was hilarious, great vid man

Something similar just happened to me in a writing class I'm being forced to take for my major we do weekly discussion board posts, you start off with body paragraphs then move to your introduction, thesis and such. I got 100's on all of these posts except for one in which I got a 90% being told by my professor to delve more deeply into one of my topics that I had mentioned in my thesis and that I was lacking slightly in the paragraph. Week 6 roles around and you basically put together your essay based on peer review and the professors notes that he gave you on whatever you had written. He gave me a 68% on the grade saying that all of my paragraphs were lacking in substance (when he himself said they were great and could be added to my final essay) I even added more details in each of the paragraphs just incase cause this is my first year as a college student after being in the military and I need to maintain a high GPA to transfer to a better university and to keep my GI Bill benefits. I'm still so fucking pissed about this it dropped my overall grade so much in the class cause this was the first of 3 projects and there is no final most of the grade is based off these projects.

Is this just the upper-level astronomy experience? They gave us a "refresher" lab on doing things with our data in Matlab, but nobody had ever used it past basics. I was the only person with a programming background though, so my group was consistently doing the best in labs. I carried math major friend through the labs and he carried me through the homework. Because he did all the meandering and working out on his paper while I tried to help or just keep up verbally, I got to neatly go directly to the point on my paper after we figured it out, so I got higher grades on our identical homework about a third of the time. Once I had gotten a question right on a test and he did not, but we compared afterwards and had taken the same approach. He brought them both in to the professor to ask about why, and she decided I probably shouldn't have gotten it right either and took some points away from me. When he had to drop I did too. Most of the class we started with had already dropped before us! I just couldn't do the homework without him, and he said almost half his study time was spent on this one class and it was bringing everything else down. Tanked my knowledge of linear algebra, I took that pretty late during the same semester and hardly know much because all my time went to that class, I really loved astrophysics and wanted to do well. But yep, just had to drop and take a W (ithdrawl, they should call it an L). Money spent, pass/fail rate down, no progress made.

woah storytime jeff video

I know reaching out to you is a stretch but I'm applying for a bsc today, and I'm really conflicted between physics and dual physics&math. I'm coming around on fixing serious motivation issues, and I don't want to overreach and add a second degree topic this impulsively, but the idea is really compelling. I don't want to get trapped with higher course load just because of a whim, but i really wanna learn these things

Happy you’re back!

watching this as someone from the UK, American university is so weird

I don't think the math courses being locked behind the analysis sequence has to do with your school being greedy. The large public university I attend does the same thing, and the LAST thing they want is students staying longer than they need to. I think the reason my university and others do this is because math departments believe that students can't handle the type of teaching done in upper div math courses without being introduced to it through the "core" upper div courses (which is generally analysis at most schools), so it might have less to do with the actual content and more to do with change in teaching style between upper div and lower div classes. I think this logic is still kind of BS though, but my assumption may just be flat out wrong.

5:33 opposite charges attract lol

My first college course was behavioral neuroscience. Our professor was teaching his first class ever. He failed nearly everyone then quit immediately to work at Microsoft. I never recovered.

Jeff - "i hate astrophysics" Me - "i've heard all I need to hear. subscribed"

and Jeff's Villain story begins.

I have subscribed…not only because you have nice presentations, but because I too am a constantly angry college student from all the hogwash in college.

Watching you, I'm happy that I was never concerned with grades. There are many paths to success, disregarding grades doesn't mean giving up, it just means that you have to find your opportunities elsewhere (e.g. not through scholarships).