When Australian university students say that they’re taking a “maths” course, they really mean it.  Whereas American math education is very much singular and compartmentalized, Australian maths education is plural and combined.  At Columbia, students take calculus and learn calculus, statistics and learn statistics, linear algebra and learn linear algebra, and so on.  In Australia, however, students take first-year maths and learn basics of calculus, differential equations, probability, statistics, and linear algebra.  This means that American study abroad students taking higher level math courses may be expected to have background knowledge that they haven’t yet learned.

When I was at the University of New South Wales, I took an engineering maths course which covered, among other things, vector calculus, differential equations, and linear algebra.  I didn’t learn much in the vector calculus part because I’d already taken Calculus IV at Columbia, which was an entire semester dedicated to that sole topic, but when it came time to cover differential equations and linear algebra, it was quite a different story.  I remember sitting through the first lecture on linear algebra, a subject I hadn’t studied since 10th grade in high school, and being completely taken aback and feeling totally lost during most of the introductory “review” lecture.  All of the students in this second year class had taken the first year course, which had covered all these basics, whereas I had absolutely no foundation for any of it and had to catch up.  I ended up borrowing a friend’s notes from the first year course to teach myself and review some of the “basics” that had baffled me, and after that the class was smooth sailing.  I’m sure I could have also approached the professor, and he or a TA would have gladly helped me through what I didn’t know.

So although this wasn’t a huge obstacle for my academic success while abroad, it was quite an unexpected part of it.  I don’t think this experience should be any kind of deterrent for students considering to study abroad, but I would encourage any students taking higher level courses while abroad to be aware that different educational systems may lead to students in your same year having very different background knowledge, and that adjustments may need to be made to compensate for this discrepancy.

By Claire Duvallet, Peer Advisor, [email protected]