Professor
A Russell
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2024 - It's 20L. This class is so difficult to enroll into that you'll rarely defer it a quarter over a shitty professor. Russell is overall a good professor. She wrote the lab manual so she's very knowledgeable about what's going on. She's also really old and sometimes requires students to help her turn on her computer, log into various UCLA sites, and accomplish other basic tasks. She's kind, patient, and cares about her students' success. She's not out here to give everybody Bs, and even though I find this class extremely extraneous as a Mechanical Engineer, it is what it is and it could've been a lot worse. The exams are simple, the labs are straight-forward, the TA team is helpful. Unfortunately, the midterm was not take-home like it was for previous sections, but there was extra credit on it which helped a lot. Overall, she's fine, and if you did well in AP Chem or Chem 20AB, you can probably ditch her lectures and still do fine. The most questionable part of this class was the Calibrated Peer Reviews, which she added this quarter to force us to practice writing 400 word responses in a scientific way to analyze a graph. It was tedious, pointless, and overall frustrating. There's no real reason to force us to write out polished responses about serial dilution, but we did it I guess. As a side note, you do need to buy a lab coat, goggles, and lab manual. I highly recommend buying/borrowing it from an upperclassmen or splitting the cost with a friend in another section. What they should really do is stock the lab room with 20 lab coats and goggles and just have us all share them throughout the week, but that would be too easy. Don't feel like you need to buy the textbook, it's definitely useless.
Spring 2024 - It's 20L. This class is so difficult to enroll into that you'll rarely defer it a quarter over a shitty professor. Russell is overall a good professor. She wrote the lab manual so she's very knowledgeable about what's going on. She's also really old and sometimes requires students to help her turn on her computer, log into various UCLA sites, and accomplish other basic tasks. She's kind, patient, and cares about her students' success. She's not out here to give everybody Bs, and even though I find this class extremely extraneous as a Mechanical Engineer, it is what it is and it could've been a lot worse. The exams are simple, the labs are straight-forward, the TA team is helpful. Unfortunately, the midterm was not take-home like it was for previous sections, but there was extra credit on it which helped a lot. Overall, she's fine, and if you did well in AP Chem or Chem 20AB, you can probably ditch her lectures and still do fine. The most questionable part of this class was the Calibrated Peer Reviews, which she added this quarter to force us to practice writing 400 word responses in a scientific way to analyze a graph. It was tedious, pointless, and overall frustrating. There's no real reason to force us to write out polished responses about serial dilution, but we did it I guess. As a side note, you do need to buy a lab coat, goggles, and lab manual. I highly recommend buying/borrowing it from an upperclassmen or splitting the cost with a friend in another section. What they should really do is stock the lab room with 20 lab coats and goggles and just have us all share them throughout the week, but that would be too easy. Don't feel like you need to buy the textbook, it's definitely useless.
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