I was super lucky that they were taught in freshman chemistry. It made it more familiar seeming later on I'm sure. I agree about thermo, it has an unexpected a

I was super lucky that they were taught in freshman chemistry. It made it more familiar seeming later on I'm sure. I agree about thermo, it has an unexpected amount of symmetry. It wasn't until my third time taking a thermo course that I think I really started to get it. I had a professor that I just straight up asked "why?" and his response was "because sometimes we want to know numbers that are hard to measure so we come up with ways to represent them using things that are easy to measure". That is by a wide margin the most practically coherent reasoning for the importance of thermo I've ever gotten, and suddenly all the seemingly arbitrarily PDE manipulation made perfect sense. Although I think the basics like "what is entropy" are pretty generally useful regardless of if you ever touch the PDEs or free energy equations.