Victoria O’Brien

Calculus MATH 1210

Signature Assignment Reflection

I think the most interesting thing is this class was learning about derivatives in general. The majority of

this class is based on derivatives and all of the uses for them. I think it was very fascinating to see how

finding a derivative of an equation leads to so many applications. I think it was good to progress through

the class and see how each section we learned built on top of one another. It was also interesting to see

how complicated equations could be solved by finding a derivative, it certainly made those scary looking

math equations much easier.

As I progressed through the class is was really interesting to see the applications for calculus in

calculating related rates, optimizations, velocity and acceleration. I never realized how much application

calculus could have for so many real world situations and now I realize how important calculus can be

for many science and engineering fields and also business and statistics as well.

I can see how calculus would be very useful in the biology field from a research purpose, studying

quantitative data like growth rates, cell systems and using calculus to analyze or model data. I think that

calculus is very helpful in understanding chemistry too, in fact some of the things we learned about in

this class helped me understand the calculations in my chemistry classes better and I wish that I had

taken this class before taking my chemistry classes.

I will say that while calculus has a lot of applications in my major and in the biology and science fields in

general, however I don’t think that calculus will have many applications in my specific job that I’m

looking to go into which is zookeeping. Animal husbandry doesn’t typically use a lot of math in the day

to day care for animals. I do think that there are potential situations that could be arise in my job, like
gathering data on animals, where calculus will be very helpful in understanding and analyzing what that

data gathered and the reason for gathering that specific information but I don’t really want to go into a

research focused position. Despite that, I am glad to have the skills I learned in the class, it’s just another

tool I can add to belt.