All first year engineering students at UBC take the same general courses (besides the arts elective). For each course, I outline the content, amount of work, and study recommendations. I’ll try to limit my own biases but keep in mind these are my experiences and everyone’s experience/skills are different. Also, different profs make a huge difference so I will recommend some good ones I had from my first year in engineering.
Curriculum
- APSC 100: Introduction to Engineering I
- APSC 101: Introduction to Engineering II
- PHYS 157: Introductory Physics for Engineers I
- PHYS 158: Introductory Physics for Engineers II
- MATH 100: Differential Calculus
- MATH 101: Integral Calculus
- MATH 152: Linear Systems
- APSC 160: Introduction to Computation in Engineering Design
- CHEM 154: Chemistry for Engineering
- ENGL 112: Engineering Communication
- PHYS 170: Mechanics 1
- + 1 Humanities or Social Science Elective
APSC 100/101
These 2 courses are the UBC engineering first year project courses, 1 in first term and the other in term 2. You learn about engineering design theories, and apply them to projects. For each class, you get randomly assigned a group of 4 or 5 teammates and together, you do projects like building a cardboard chair, desiging a mechanical claw, writing a report recommending a water system, or designing a 3D printed device in CAD for a handicapped person.
- Prof: un-choose-able! We had the same profs for all sections.
- Coursework: 1 project/month, plus weekly video lectures to watch and quizzes following these lectures. Also has team quizzes 1 lecture per week, tutorials (project-work time), and midterms + finals where you get tested on all the video lecture things.
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Study Recommendations:
- Start early on the projects. At the beginning of each project, the pace in tutorials are super slow. However, in the last week it is due, there is always a lot to do. So always review what needs to be done for each project early, and divide up the tasks or plan meetings.
PHYS 157
The first university level physics you will take, so definitely takes a while to get used to. Especially the first unit regarding stress/tensions, homework questions were extremely challenging at first. However, once you get used to it, and start paying attention in class and using web resources (+ repetition), it becomes much easier. I found that at the end of the term, I started to really understand the concepts and questions in the first unit.
- Prof: Mark Raamsdonk - amazing prof, so if you get the chance please take his course. Our class had a ~10% higher average than other classes.
- Coursework: Weekly/biweekly written assignments, online quizzes before lectures.
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Study Recommendations:
- Read the textbook before lectures so you can follow along
- Really good open source textbook-> Libretexts. I think it is even better than the one we use in class, and it has all the units we need to cover
MATH 100
If you have already taken AP Calculus AB, this is pretty much the same. I had credits from taking AP Calc in highschool, but retook the course because I thought the university version would be more in depth, and other people have recommended me to retake it as well for the same reason. However, after taking MATH 100 myself, I realized it was pretty much a repeat of AP Calculus, and not worth the time, stress and money to do again if you already have credits.
- Prof: I highly recommend Dragos Ghioca. He is awesome, and explains concepts thoroughly and gives examples. For math courses, you can basically go and listen to any lecture, since there are no marks for participation. Just make sure to go to your registered section when it comes to midterms! I wasn't registered in Dragos' section, but still went for his classes.
- Weekly online problems.
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Study Recommendations:
- Do ~5 practice exams to prepare for midterms/finals!
CHEM 154
Mostly an extension of Chemistry 12, and a mix of memorization and math. Also had a lab component, but that was only once a month. Writing the lab report during the lab was kind of annoying, but the lab itself was very chill: there was plenty of time and you can ask the TA’s to help with anything.
- Prof: Chris Addition.
- Coursework: There are a set of ~15 online problems every week, plus some in class quizzes.
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Study Recommendations:
- Recommend this website for reviewing concepts that are not clear: Purdue Education
- If I was transported back in time into first year and had to take this class again, I would probably do the workbook every week and check my answers. The workbook questions are very similar to exam ones.
APSC 160
Introduction to programming for engineering students, using the language C. The first half of the course is focused on learning to code in C, and the second half is using DAQ hardware to detect inputs. One of the easier courses in first year engineering at UBC, not a lot of homework and easy to understand.
- Prof: Paul Carter (very good) and Paul Davis. The first half of the course was taught by the good Paul, the second half by the other Paul.
- Coursework: This course is known as a “flipped lecture”, meaning that the course material is taught online in the form of videos made by the professor. You are expected to watch these on your own time every week. Then, everyone works on worksheets in class that practices the material taught in videos.
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Study Recommendations:
- Keep up and finish the worksheets (on paper -- because exams are always written on paper) if you didn’t get a chance to in class. If you finished in class, always check your answers later.
ENGL 112
Engineering students are required to take this first year english course. Mostly focuses on the scientific method (research papers, etc).
- Prof: Tara Lee. Her class is very chill, and she is sophisticated and uses fancy vocabulary. Easy marker as well.
- Coursework: This depends heavily on your professor, since they have the freedom to teach/evaluate however they want. For my english class, we had weekly readings (scientific research papers) from a textbook, and we had to write 1 summary, 2 rhetorical essays and 1 research paper. The final exam consisted of a summary and a rhetorical analysis, with the topic of the rhetorical analysis based on the weekly readings. Overall, I didn’t do a lot of work for this class (except when essays were due) and barely did the readings until final exams.
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Study Recommendations:
- Start writing your essays early, and spend some time on them.
PHYS 158
A continuation of PHYS 157 from term 1. However, beware that this course is a lot harder. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that the slides are very disorganized and there are way too many topics covered in such a short time.
- Prof: Marina Litinskaya. She's very good at explaining during office hours.
- Coursework: Prepare to spend some time on your own learning the concepts or going to office hours to ask questions and get a better understanding. I actually ended up going to BYC final preparation for this course, the only BYC I went to in first year.
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Study Recommendations:
- As with PHYS 157, the online libretext has the contents of this course and is very useful: LibreTexts II
- Actually read the readings before going to lecture or you will be completely lost and have to go to BYC like me.
MATH 101
A continuation of Math 100, but only integrals.
- Prof: Nicolau Sarquis Aiex, he's great!
- Coursework: Do a lot of problems from the CLP problem section where they mix the integrals, so you have to think about which integration technique to use. That was basically the whole course - recognizing which integration technique to use as fast as possible. I was able to get a really good grade in this course just by doing the CLP mixed integrals section.
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Study Recommendations:
- For harder topics like optimization, I really like to listen to Prof. Leonard’s online lectures on Youtube. You can find them here: Prof. Leonard. They are super helpful for understanding and also for examples.
PHYS 170
Similar to dynamics in physics 12, this course consists of drawing free body diagrams, and calculating the different forces on an object. But don’t worry, PHYS 170 is very easy compared to the other physics courses, mostly because there are only a few types of problems, and once you learn how to do a few problems, you can do all of them. I think this was the easiest course in first year.
- Prof: Malcolm McMillan. Very nice and good at teaching. He often dismisses the class half an hour early since he doesn't actually do the problem again but explains instead how he dervives the answer.
- Coursework: Weekly problems ~3 online. In tutorials, you get into a group of 4, and solve 1 problem together.
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Study Recommendations:
- During class, try to follow along by doing the problem yourself the same time the professor explains it. Bring your graphing calculator and get the result on your calculator as well.
- Do all the posted past final exams! Our final had the exact same questions as a few of the past final exams, except with different numbers.
MATH 152
Linear Algebra, involving vectors, planes and matrices. Very different from calculus. I struggled with this course a lot in the beginning (getting 55-60% in midterms), and then I went to listen to Elyse Yeager’s class, and the rest is history. I ended up with low 80’s at the end. I don't think the material is hard, but it is very different from anything I've seen before, and I had a poor professor, so it didn't make sense to me for quite a while.
- Prof: My prof was not so good -- I highly recommend Elyse Yeager.
- Coursework: Weekly online problems.
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Study Recommendations:
- Listen to Elyse Yeager’s class. Or you could find her recorded lectures here, but they are the last ⅓ of the course: Math 152 Video Lectures. They actually started recording 2/3 of the way through the course because too many people started showing up to Yeager's class, to the point where there were no more seats and people had to stand.
PHYS 159
A one credit physics lab. Usually averages are very high, except it requires a lot of effort—considering that it is a 1 credit course—in writing the pre-labs and finishing lab papers each week.
- Prof: Not really important.
- Coursework: Weekly labs. Takes about 5 hours/week outside of lab time to write results (or I’m just slow).
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Study Recommendations:
- Not much to study for.
Overall, UBC engineering first year has some pretty great courses to be excited about! For some tips on how to plan your timetable, see UBC course registration tips.
