DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!

I want robotics to be my entire career. I love it so much and have been excited to take this capstone class since my freshman year at UCLA. Unfortunately, it has been one of the most unfulfilling and disappointing experiences I’ve ever had, despite me trying to make the best of it at every turn. I’m expecting to get an A or A- in this class so I’m not upset about a grade or something. I’m upset because this class is run by a group of professors who have no business at all running it (not the TAs, they actually gave constructive feedback and really tried their best to help). The professors’ feeble attempt at creating any sort of structure completely fell flat– and that is giving them the benefit of the doubt assuming they even tried at all (which I honestly don’t think they did.) At every possible juncture, we felt like an afterthought to these clowns. And yes, I genuinely mean clowns.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of some things they did:
1) Posted the turn-in link for assignments at 1AM when they were due noon the next day, after assigning those same assignments less than 48 hours beforehand.
2) Made assignments due BEFORE the class time that they alloted to WORK ON THOSE ASSIGNMENTS.
3) Assigned labs with insanely unreasonable timelines and no instruction besides incredibly low-quality recorded lectures from years ago that cover theory without any examples remotely close to the material of the labs.
4) Canceled class on multiple occasions WITHOUT TELLING STUDENTS, waiting for us to arrive at the room (some who commuted over 30 minutes to get there) to tell us “oh yeah we have nothing planned. You can go home.”
5) Tried to gaslight our entire class into believing there was an assignment and presentation that had been discussed and was due in under 24 hours. Then after we busted our asses to complete that assignment overnight (which required the coordination of 9 people with mismatched, busy schedules), we were told in class that “by make the Gantt chart, they meant we had to make the chart AND AND ENTIRE PRESENTATION that we would be presenting in ONE HOUR.”
6) Halfway through the class decided to combine the ME and ECE canvas sites, erasing all ECE assignments, discussion forums, and announcements. Yep, there goes the spec I needed to work on the lab. Was it reposted? No. My favorite part about this one is that these fools didn’t even realize everything was erased for about 24 hours until I emailed them about it.

I have never seen such disrespect by professors and complete disregard for their students’ time. This class is a joint course between mechanical and electrical engineers. The problem is the ratio of ECE to ME students is 3:6 and the ECE to ME workload for the labs is about 10:1, and that is generous. The ME’s agree completely too; we had to formulate an entire kinematics model mathematically with virtually no description of the system, code a working model with graphing and animations in python, set up a Webots simulation and write code for that so it could interface with the python code, and then build the differential drive robot out of wood and completely design, wire, and solder the entire thing together. The mechanical engineers built a wooden skeleton of the woodbot out of balsa wood (with no electronics), then broke it with weights. That’s literally it. They finished in class. We stayed up until 5AM sometimes working on our part, only to find out the components they gave us were bad or the code wasn’t like the spec said it was. Oh yeah, and they wanted all that from 3 students in 4 weeks while giving us a ton of other bullshit on the “project track.”

Let’s talk about the project track. I don’t think I have ever wasted that amount of time in a class on anything more asinine as the “design process” they put us through. I’m very familiar with the formal design process and even did more research into it for this class. It involves coming up with a problem and justifying design decisions to come up with some solution. It does NOT involve 3 weeks of brainstorming 9 different technologies and giving 30 MINUTE PRESENTATION ON THEM WEEKLY to figure out a project idea. It was around the second week of these brain-melting presentations that I began developing a genuine resentment for this class. Amazingly enough, exactly zero of the ideas we generated during this three-week shitfest contributed in any way to our final project idea– mostly because every idea we came up with, the professors shit on immediately. I’m all for telling students to be realistic, but they did it in the most demoralizing way possible.

On that note, let me say I actually respect Mehta as a researcher and engineer for his work. That said, he is hands down one of the lowest-quality professors I have ever come across in my entire life. Ankur Mehta is the ringleader of the absolute circus that is this course. I've never wanted to give a Bruinwalk review with a negative number of stars until now. My favorite review of this class said, “Do not expect any sympathy from this shell of a man.” I understand what they meant. He did not say a single positive word to me the entire course. Apparently we did nothing right; nobody did. Only negative feedback from him, half of which contradicts the feedback he would give the next day. I would review Jacob Rosen as well, but he said about 20 audible words to the class over the course of 10 weeks. He actually seems like a nice guy, so I don’t really have anything bad to say about him. I don’t know if this is because I’m an ECE, but it felt like he wasn’t even an instructor for this class. It felt more like Rosen sat there and watched Mehta’s cesspool of woodbot hell unfold in front of him.

But even these two seem half competent next to the “sharks” they brought in for our mock investor pitch. Not only did we get grilled on one aspect of our design for the majority of the 8 minutes of question time, but this aspect was a SOLVED PROBLEM. The expert on IR sensors was basically trying to flex on undergraduate students that they knew more about IR sensors. What a sad existence. Thank you for wasting all the work we put into preparing backup slides and answers to meaningful questions. And better yet, the group after us wanted to use IR sensors across 10x to 100x the distance and received no questions about them. We weren’t asked a single investment or business style question– they treated it like a design review which was NOT what we were told to expect. Again, a COLOSSAL waste of everybody’s time.

And that’s really what the first quarter of this class was: busy work and wasted time. I’m going into the second quarter as optimistically as possible to try to salvage the senior capstone I was so excited about for years. I didn’t think I would genuinely start crying in a lab session from the pressure of this class that was supposed to be a good time. But I guess I was wrong. Mehta, you single-handedly ruined the academic portion of my last two quarters at UCLA.

Please never teach human beings again.

Please don't take this class!

I liked almost all of my classes at UCLA even some with terrible bruinwalk reviews so I ignored the review for this class and took it. Robotics is cool and fun but rather than learn about robots in this class, you do meaningless pointless work. Think BS meetings at work but rather than getting paid for attending, you pay them to be forced to attend. No live lectures are given so you watch old recording as homework. You have to give a presentation pretty much every week in addition to working on labs that may or may not be graded (it's week 8 and no grades have been given). Labs are also poorly written with different requirements in different places. Finally, 9 person groups where ME and EE students are separated are super unproductive for presentations bc you'll need to spend hours outside of class preparing for them. Also it's extremely hard to find times where 9 people are free outside of class. Finally, these ME and EE sections are given different instructions causing this entire class to be disorganized.

DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS.

There are much better options. Take your design course with a professor who cares for their students. Mehta has turned to a robot.
Capstone courses are challenging. Choose your professor wisely. There are always unpredictable things in course. Mehta is never understanding.
Worst professor ever.

TAKE THIS REVIEW SERIOUSLY!
I read the horrible reviews about professor Mehta on the bruinwalk website, but I had to take the course. Otherwise, I had to wait another year to find another design course. DO NOT make my mistake. Wait another year if you have to, but DO NOT take his classes. Sky high expectations, zero guidance. What he teaches you in class you can be found on youtube much better explained, and what he expects you to do can be found nowhere. He never replies to your emails. Never cares for students. The cheap robot he gives you has a lot of bugs. Every time we got together to do the experiments the robot was not working. If a problem happens to you do not expect him to be understanding or supportive. As other reviews also say he is a "shell of human". do not expect any humanity from this shell of human. I worked really hard, and I did most of the work for both quarters, but he graded me much lower than my groupmates because he doesn't know who did what. He never cared to know. Lazy people take advantage of his stupid policies and put all the work on poor students who care for their grades. He has no morals and no values. I read a review which referred him as AIDS, and asking all students to stay away from this professor. I didn't take it seriously. Now I know what they meant. He is like AIDS stay away from him. Take this review as bruin helping bruins. DO NOT TAKE HIS CLASSES. HE WILL DAMAGE YOU MENTALLY. He does not take female students seriously. There are a lot of discriminations in his class. If you have seen a sexual harassment from him report it to title 9 even if it seems small.
Shame on EE department for hiring such professor for the " best public school in the nation". If you claim to be the best public school in the nation, you cannot have professors like Mehta in the school. EE department waits until something serious and irreplaceable happens to students then they will finally decide to act properly and fire this professor. This guy should not be allowed around students.

Worst professor ever. Read the reviews for his other classes. Then, you will have a better idea and hopefully won’t take any of his classes. The previous review is probably written by himself or a fake account. Read all the reviews and make your own decision.

First of all, I like Professor Mehta. totally did not expect to see the review below. Like how is that even allowed???? So f***** mean and deragatory. I have empathy for instructors (and students..), who are trying to teach in a time of ..oh what...A PANDEMIC.
I think Professor Mehta is extremely intelligent, caring, and funny. I don't even know him well, but I feel compelled to review when seeing such nastiness online, especially towards people who don't deserve it. Just because you get a bad grade, don't anonymously sit behind your computer and write hate speech. Life is not about grades. Move ON.

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Editing my comment now in response to the other nasty comment:
When does it become okay to compare A PERSON to "aids" and call him "a shell of man"??? Why would someone defending that (out of human decency) be called fake?
This is so sad and pathetic.

Generally, avoid professor Mehta, but this class isn't really that bad. To be brief:
Pros:
- Mehta has an impressive knowledge base that could help him provide a meaningful experience for students.
- Class has clearly improved from last reviews -- second half of class is more enjoyable than the first, and the final five weeks have a nice vibe.

Cons:
- Large amount of unnecessary busy work that does not help you complete your project
- The labs in the first quarter of this class are the most useless thing you will ever do with 20 hours of your time.
- Feedback will very often be negative, sometimes neutral, and never positive. Mehta will contradict himself just to give you negative feedback. (TA was great and reasonable though)
- He will speak for 30 minutes about something somewhat related to questions you ask while often failing to actually answer the question.