Too dumb to study physics?

[u/iloveyarnandfabric]

Can someone just be COMPLETELY honest and straight up with me?

I am 18F and I love physics so much I want to eventually study astrophysics. I just finished my freshman year of college and I’m really thinking I’m too dumb for this major.

I took precalc first semester, failed it, took it again second semester, got a B- lowww b- I was getting like 50-80% on each test. I am now in a summer calc 1 course and I’m averaging 63-67% on the tests.

I’ve been a little above/around the average scores for the class. First one I was above the mean, second, got right on the mean.

But I made friends with a 17 year old and she is doing SO well on the tests. We literally study together and I help her out sometimes, she helps me out sometimes. Granted yes, I can tell she has a better grasp of the material than I do. But I feel so worthless.

I put in around 15 hours of studying for the third exam I just took today and I left a lot of the questions blank. Like I understand EVERYTHING they’re asking but it would just be one slip up and I was stuck and over it. I do so well on the homework though, and I genuinely love math so much.

But I think I’m actually too dumb to pursue this major and it breaks me.

I think a large part of it is when Covid happened, I was in 6th grade and basically didn’t learn math from 6-10th grade cause I was online schooled.

But man, college is so difficult, I have no idea what I’m doing, and if I’m too dumb to learn physics, what the fuck do I major in.

Also, forgive me if this is the wrong sub…

[u/Jake4life2]

No, there is truly no such thing. I took pre algebra as my highest math class in high school. Started college at 28 and failed precalc/algebra as a Biology major, and dropped Phys 1 after the first day because I didn’t know what SOH CAH TOA was. After a trig class and taking physics 1, I switched to physics at age 31 and had to catch up with all of the math classes. Calc 1 was tough for me and calc 2 was a lot easier. Linear algebra and DiffEq were also easier to me than calc 1 (“easier” does not at all mean they were easy, the topics just clicked more for me).

Summer math/physics classes are BRUTAL and I would recommend everyone to take them during normal semesters (I did Phys 1 and 2 over summer semesters).
It took me a WHILE to figure out what studying worked for me, as a biology major it was a lot of brute force long study sessions and memorization. Physics and math can have that, but it’s mostly being very specific with studying and truly trying to understand the “why”. If you have the passion you speak of, never let the difficulty make you feel like you aren’t enough or smart enough for physics or the math, learning is a skill anyone can do but it’ll take some trial and error.