After the Fall of 1990, when I had my worst academic semester, I followed it up with my best academic semester. In Spring of '91 I took Astronomy 7, Chemistry 1A, Classics 34, and Electric Engineering 40. I was finally done with Math (other than one upper division class requirement) and Physics and the intro Computer Science classes.

I've commented before about the EECS course requirements. After completing all your major requirements (lots of CS, some EE, sciences and arts), there is literally only about one semester's worth of truly independent units that you can use on anything. Less if you did it wrong, more if you somehow combined two requirements into one class (that's what the experimental classes are for). Still, being the foolish CS boy I used those extra units on CS classes, trying to take every class available, and I only missed a couple out of over a dozen upper division courses. If not for the humanities requirements I probably would not be as well rounded today (not that I'm all that well rounded with respects to my knowledge).

Anyways, Astro 7 and 10 were the only lower division Astronomy courses. Actually there was a 7H course for the really math inclined. Astro 10 was the Astronomy without math course, Astro 7 had some math which for the most part I was comfortable with. There was a point when I thought I'd minor in Astronomy, since it was so interesting. Too bad there is no Minor offered for Astronomy, only Majors.

It was a fun class. We had a big book to read, but we also used telescopes and had some in-class labs where we went to various research labs on campus. The thing about space is that it's big, really big (unimaginably so). This makes the mathematics extremely precise. Being off by 1% means you totally miss, and since it's really hard to come up with exact numbers it's quite a frustrating discipline.

Take one example, the equation I remember most, which is still nothing -- the number of inhabited planets in the galaxy. You take the number of stars in the galaxy, multiply by the chance that the star is of the correct type, multiply by the chance that the star is of the correct age, multiply by the average number of habitable planets, multiply by the chance that life on those planets is in that few-thousand years span where civilization rises and then falls, and a couple of other things and you number of planets where there could be intelligent life at the same time that there is intelligent life on this planet. Depending on your assumptions (and reasonable assumptions too) it could be from 0 to millions of planets. And that's because space is huge -- any change in the numbers has a huge effect.

Yet another subject that I thought would be easy and yet it's quite hard once you really get into it. That fact you discover as you take more courses. If nothing else I came out of college with the knowledge to be really good at anything is still hard work. Everything that I think is easy, is not when you really get into it and try to be an expert.

Chemistry 1A was an easy class. I would say that it was exactly like my 7th grade chemistry class and my 10th grade chemistry class. You learn about atoms and then about reactions and then you do a lot of experiments. The labs were really fun. It's one thing to test Newton's Laws in a Physics lab, quite another thing to split up Hydrogen and Oxygen from water and explode them. Certainly one of the easiest classes I took in Berkeley as I already knew everything taught in that class.

Now Mike, Darren's friend, was an Organic Chemistry major. And I met one or two other O-Chem majors. Now that is a tough major. Memorizing protein structures and enzymes and their reactions and of course the math -- it's all much more tedious and harder than I'd like. I'm sure there are happy O-Chem majors, but I didn't meet any. They all were resigned to it, knowing it was extremely hard. But they didn't look like they were having fun.