Some people have stories about an inspiring teacher who introduced them to their life’s passion. My story is different: I became a physicist due to a famously bad teacher.

My high school was, in general, a good place to learn science, but physics was the exception. The teacher at the time had a bad reputation, and while I don’t remember exactly why I do remember his students didn’t end up learning much physics. My parents were aware of the problem, and aware that physics was something I might have a real talent for. I was already going to take math at the university, having passed calculus at the high school the year before, taking advantage of a program that let advanced high school students take free university classes. Why not take physics at the university too?

This ended up giving me a huge head-start, letting me skip ahead to the fun stuff when I started my Bachelor’s degree two years later. But in retrospect, I’m realizing it helped me even more. Skipping high-school physics didn’t just let me move ahead: it also let me avoid a class that is in many ways more difficult than university physics.

High school physics is a mess of mind-numbing formulas. How is velocity related to time, or acceleration to displacement? What’s the current generated by a changing magnetic field, or the magnetic field generated by a current? Students learn a pile of apparently different procedures to calculate things that they usually don’t particularly care about.

Once you know some math, though, you learn that most of these formulas are related. Integration and differentiation turn the mess of formulas about acceleration and velocity into a few simple definitions. Understand vectors, and instead of a stack of different rules about magnets and circuits you can learn Maxwell’s equations, which show how all of those seemingly arbitrary rules fit together in one reasonable package.

This doesn’t just happen when you go from high school physics to first-year university physics. The pattern keeps going.

In a textbook, you might see four equations to represent what Maxwell found. But once you’ve learned special relativity and some special notation, they combine into something much simpler. Instead of having to keep track of forces in diagrams, you can write down a Lagrangian and get the laws of motion with a reliable procedure. Instead of a mess of creation and annihilation operators, you can use a path integral. The more physics you learn, the more seemingly different ideas get unified, the less you have to memorize and the more just makes sense. The more physics you study, the easier it gets.

Until, that is, it doesn’t anymore. A physics education is meant to catch you up to the state of the art, and it does. But while the physics along the way has been cleaned up, the state of the art has not. We don’t yet have a unified set of physical laws, or even a unified way to do physics. Doing real research means once again learning the details: quantum computing algorithms or Monte Carlo simulation strategies, statistical tools or integrable models, atomic lattices or topological field theories.

Most of the confusions along the way were research problems in their own day. Electricity and magnetism were understood and unified piece by piece, one phenomenon after another before Maxwell linked them all together, before Lorentz and Poincaré and Einstein linked them further still. Once a student might have had to learn a mess of particles with names like J/Psi, now they need just six types of quarks.

So if you’re a student now, don’t despair. Physics will get easier, things will make more sense. And if you keep pursuing it, eventually, it will stop making sense once again.