The document describes MAT 111: Calculus 1, a course the author took during their freshman year at Bethel College. Key topics covered in the class included functions, derivatives, differentials, concavity, and points of inflection. Though the author did not know it at the time, these concepts would prove important in their later engineering courses at Texas Tech. The main focus of the course was understanding what derivatives are and how they measure the rate of change of a function. For example, the derivative of y=2x is 2, while the derivative of y=x^2 is 2x. Integrals are the opposite of derivatives and can be used to find the area under a curve.

1. MAT 111: Calculus 1
In fall 2010 during my freshman year, I studied calculus 1, MAT 111, at Bethel College
in North Newton, KS. In this class, topics covered included the formal definition of a function;
the definitions of the derivative and the differential and what their accompanying rules were; and
what concavity and points of inflection are. Though I did not know at the time that I would
eventually be transferring to Texas Tech later on in my academic career, these concepts would in
the second-half of my course of Statics and further engineering courses at Texas Tech become
heavily invoked and become keys to simplifying the work done in each of those classes.
The main overarching concept in this course was reaching a solid understanding of what
the derivative of a function is. Simply put, the derivative of a function measures the
responsiveness of that function to change, in other words, the slope of the line at any given point
along that function’s graph (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2016). For example, in the function y=2x,
the derivative would be 2, and the slope would be constant. In other functions however, if the
variable x were to have exponents attached to it then the derivative would be a changing
quantity: a function of x. In this case, if y=x2, then the derivative would be 2x.
Furthermore, the integral is the opposite of the derivative and is useful for finding the
area of a graph. Without getting into the mechanics, finding the integral of a function is the
opposite of finding the derivative. This was one of its main uses in my engineering courses as it
allowed me to find the amount of forces acting an object and where specifically they were
located without having to do the theoretical work that actually drove those types of problems.
Essentially, it was a shortcut and was how the material from calculus 2 remained useful.
Reference

2. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (2016). How to find the derivative of a line. Retrieved from
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-find-the-derivative-of-a-line.html