Vera Kistiakowsky quantum mechanics course (Eagar undergraduate)

Appears in 1 lecture.

Appearances across the corpus

REC_S2020_01 · Recitations, Spring 2020 · §3.p3

This comes from when I was flunking quantum mechanics as an undergraduate. I was a junior. There was no reason I needed to take an introduction to quantum mechanics — it wasn't required for course three. For some reason I decided I needed to learn more quantum mechanics, so I took this course taught by Vera Kistiakowsky. Anybody ever heard of Vera Kistiakowsky? Her father won the Nobel Prize at Harvard in chemistry. She was, I think, the first tenured woman faculty member in physics at MIT, and she was a wonderful teacher. But I didn't understand anything in this course. Everybody else was getting 85 on their homework; I was getting 15. I figured I was going to flunk the course. We had a couple of one-hour quizzes and I squeaked by at the bottom of the scale.