Indeed! Cambridge admits all science students to the NatSci tripos; in my day you had to do three subjects plus various choices of maths in the first year, three subjects in the second year (one of which could be maths), and then a single subject in the final year. A lot of people I know started out intending to read either physics or chemistry, and ended up reading whatever they'd taken as their third subject -- usually geology or some form of biology.
I certainly was never advised at school of the level of maths knowledge that was necessary to get anywhere in physical chemistry (which was what interested me). It was obvious that chemistry was not going to work by the end of the first week, when my inability to do partial differential equations made my supervisor despair of me!
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branchandroot
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Date: 2014-10-04 11:57 pm (UTC)I certainly was never advised at school of the level of maths knowledge that was necessary to get anywhere in physical chemistry (which was what interested me). It was obvious that chemistry was not going to work by the end of the first week, when my inability to do partial differential equations made my supervisor despair of me!