Also true in the US; I don't know what the "year 2" people are thinking.

At my university, the quickest you would be able to take it was the second year because Calc 1 and Calc 2 were considered pre-reqs. Assuming you're a normal student doing only Fall/Spring semester, you can't take Calc 1 and 2 simultaneously.

Unless you had AP Calc in high school and managed to get the university to accept it. I think quiet a few ABET schools don't accept AP Calc as a full replacement for Calc 1 if your an engineering major.

Here in the US I was: calc 2 (year 1), calc 3, linear methods (year 2), discrete math, theory of computation (year 3). The downside being that the math and comp. sci courses had no overlap, so I've basically forgotten the first 1.5 years. Might have been better off at a state college.

And wow, coming in from the other end of the scale to even the bias...

Did an internship in biotech then spent the next ten years working the only 2-3 blue collar jobs I could land while applying to thousands of jobs per year and writing hundreds of cover letters per year: retail, call centers, IT, software development, comp sci, secretarial, and other random fields I have certifications in. All told, zero interviews. Spent my spare time working on open-source projects and tutoring programming and data science.

Suffered a horrible work-related injury near the end of the decade and had to quit, but just as my savings were about to expire I managed to find a government contracting job for 80K/year, which is nearly 3x my previous salary. I suffer incredible pain at work due to my injury, and spend all my spare time recuperating and exercising, and spend all my money on healthcare and moonshots to no avail. I've wound down all my hobbies. I thought I'd start socializing once I could afford it, but I'm in too much pain.

Competence in government really doesn't reflect my experience in landing a job. What a silver lining. When I can barely walk I can just not show up and nobody would even notice. So career-wise I don't think I'm going anywhere. Life-wise I'm limping on, I guess.

I’ve seen it put after calculus for whatever reason, usually. Surprisingly, even for engineering students, calculus often takes up the first year of classes in the US.

In Australia, and a number of European countries, Calculus takes up the last two years of high school in the advanced stream (for anybody intending to go to university and take Law, Engineering, Medicine, Physics, Chem, etc).

Interestingly in serious university mathematics when looking at the foundations of mathematics, Linear Algebra is a functional prerequisite of multivariate calculus and anything higher dimensional as LA provides a literal basis for abstract spaces and local approximations to continuous functions, etc.

(Often the two are formally taught in parallel)

It’s the same in the US. My son is in 10th grade doing Pre-Calculus now and should be in AP Calculus next year.

If you don’t take the AP class to test out of it, you’d have to take it first in college though.

I imagine many people strong enough in math to pursue sciences will go the AP route and test out of it, but not everybody takes the same path.

At the place I went, they designed the curriculum around students that came in without it. But I guess testing out gives room for a gen-ed.

I dunno. The vibe in high school’s hardest math class and college’s easiest math class is kinda different. Might be worth doing both, haha. Easy A, too.

I generally think it should be taught along calc 3 (advanced integration and differential equations), as there's decent conceptual overlap and basic calculus helps weed out those who might not be ready for a more rigorous course.

Also to clarify wrt calculus, it is very common for university-track students to take AP calculus in high school, which allows them to take an examination that most universities accept to prove mastery of the equivalent to calc 1 or calc 1+2 depending on the examination.