taking up chemistry in fifth year now!

hatethisfeeling

Hey, well as you can see Im in fifth year and recently decided I want to do something to do with science after school and a lot of the course I would be interested in advise having 2 science subjects. I am doing biology, and there is a small number of students doing chemistry while the rest of us are doing LCVP. I hate LCVP with a passion and have quite a logical mind and I am doing honours maths.
My aunt was also a chemistry teacher and said she can give me grinds during the summer.
Do you think if I was to take up chemistry now that I would be able to do it and get a good mark in the leaving?Im kinda apprehensive as I will have to commit to it and its gonna be hard going in now but I would be willing to work at it over the summer.

Lawliet

If you work hard over the summer and get grinds then you should be alright. Chemistry can be a pretty tough subject, but it's one of the shorter leaving cert courses. If you're serious about science you should definitely go for it.

H2student

Of course you can do it, I haven't paid any attention in Chemistry at all last year and only started doing work in 6th year and I'm doing fine now. The paper is great since you can be almost guaranteed six topic-specific long questions.

Since you have a logical mind you'll have no problem understanding it if you know the basics.

partyatmygaff

It's a tough course and you absolutely have to at least watch the experiments if not do them as some of them are pretty complex. It's very short though so if you work hard at it you will have no problem doing it in one year.

dambarude

You can definitely do it. I started the course in September of fifth year and had finished by the time it came to the summer holidays. I had very little left to do when it came to sixth year. It will depend on yourself really on how easy or hard you find it, different people have different abilities and tastes.

My learning method wasn't ideal, in that I didn't get to see any of the experiments being done, not even on a video, but I still got an A1. I really liked the theory and the mathematical parts of the subject, I enjoyed learning it, and that really helped.

Chuchoter

Go for it. Work your ass off over the summer and you should be ok. As far as I'm aware there are very few experiments and I don't know if its like JC where you get marks for them but still, you need Chem for loads of science courses in University.

partyatmygaff

crayolastereo wrote: »

Go for it. Work your ass off over the summer and you should be ok. As far as I'm aware there are very few experiments and I don't know if its like JC where you get marks for them but still, you need Chem for loads of science courses in University.

There are a lot of experiments tbh, far more than biology for example. They're complicated but repetitive, i.e. there are around 5 different titrations that you need to do for acids/bases and they're all fairly similar in method but different in the input (Chemicals) and examination (What you're attempting to find out from the experiment)

OxfordComma

Go for it, if you're willing to work hard at it. Chemistry is, as other posters have said, a difficult subject, so you really do need to be prepared for a very steep learning curve initially; don't be too discouraged if you find yourself completely lost in the early parts of the course (I know I did when I was in 5th Year). The subject gets a lot easier to understand over time if you stick with it. Thankfully, the course is quite short and the paper itself is generally not too bad.

zam

God I hope you can do well in it. I took it up at the start of this year (I'm in 6th year!), only just finished the course. As you can assume I have a lot of work to do... :P

pajero12

Honestly i wouldnt reccomend it....its way harder than biology imho...If I were you i'd take up ag science...very manageable in a year

hatethisfeeling

thanks for the help everyone...not gonna do it because I reckon Id end up suffering in other subjects if I did it..gonna concentrate on improving everything this summer instead!