Professor
Christopher Matthes
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2019 - This class is pretty bad but its a requirement for the major. This prof assigns 9 reports of which 5 are full group lab reports, 3 are group summaries, and 1 is an individual report. This class can either be the biggest time drain or pretty chill depending on your group members. Unfortunately for me, my some of my partners were pretty useless and left me and the other members to do all the work. The summaries are quite easy as they do not require great attention to detail as most of the work and data does not need to be shown. The reports are extremely difficult since the lab manual is very confusing and none of the TAs and professors knew anything. In fact, asking them questions was quite useless and wasted time. This was essentially the blind leading the blind. A person's best bet would be to ask people who already submitted the reports what they did. The individual report, although daunting at first, is quite easy so long as you can partner up with a friend and split up the data reduction, and show different data and graphs in the main report. All of these labs are pretty bad, but the saving grace is that you really only need to spend 1-2 days a week on this. Hopefully you get good group members or this class is actually a living hell.
Spring 2019 - This class is pretty bad but its a requirement for the major. This prof assigns 9 reports of which 5 are full group lab reports, 3 are group summaries, and 1 is an individual report. This class can either be the biggest time drain or pretty chill depending on your group members. Unfortunately for me, my some of my partners were pretty useless and left me and the other members to do all the work. The summaries are quite easy as they do not require great attention to detail as most of the work and data does not need to be shown. The reports are extremely difficult since the lab manual is very confusing and none of the TAs and professors knew anything. In fact, asking them questions was quite useless and wasted time. This was essentially the blind leading the blind. A person's best bet would be to ask people who already submitted the reports what they did. The individual report, although daunting at first, is quite easy so long as you can partner up with a friend and split up the data reduction, and show different data and graphs in the main report. All of these labs are pretty bad, but the saving grace is that you really only need to spend 1-2 days a week on this. Hopefully you get good group members or this class is actually a living hell.
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2023 - Lectures: Reverse lecture style, where you watch lectures on Youtube and he does examples in class. The lectures are from Hopkins, who is a mechanisms expert in his own right. He's got good lectures, and depending on your preferred learning method, you may or may not enjoy it. I highly recommend attending Matthe's supplementary lectures as the examples he goes over are similar to homework and exams. Homework: Not too long, 3-4 problems per week on average. Discussion: Because of the reverse lecture style, the discussion takes up one of the lecture spots. Definitely go to the discussion, the TA will go over problems ripped straight from old exams. If you're resourceful you can figure out how Matthes likes to structure his exam questions. Exams: Like the homework but slightly more difficult, with longer questions. Nothing unfair but there are a lot of topics. Project: The best and worst part of the course. The design problem itself is pretty fun. If you get a good group it'll be pretty straightforward, arguably pretty MATLAB heavy but not bad. If you get a bad group you'll find yourself shouldering a large portion of the work alone. In addition, the groups are 10 people, so unless you somehow have 9 friends taking the class with you, you're going to have a few slackers. Good luck! Overall: Don't get complacent and think this is 102 pt.2. While in some ways it is, it's a bit less intuitive if you don't practice. Make sure to keep up with both recorded and live lectures. If you fall behind, it's hard to learn the material all at once, as there's a lot of nuance.
Fall 2023 - Lectures: Reverse lecture style, where you watch lectures on Youtube and he does examples in class. The lectures are from Hopkins, who is a mechanisms expert in his own right. He's got good lectures, and depending on your preferred learning method, you may or may not enjoy it. I highly recommend attending Matthe's supplementary lectures as the examples he goes over are similar to homework and exams. Homework: Not too long, 3-4 problems per week on average. Discussion: Because of the reverse lecture style, the discussion takes up one of the lecture spots. Definitely go to the discussion, the TA will go over problems ripped straight from old exams. If you're resourceful you can figure out how Matthes likes to structure his exam questions. Exams: Like the homework but slightly more difficult, with longer questions. Nothing unfair but there are a lot of topics. Project: The best and worst part of the course. The design problem itself is pretty fun. If you get a good group it'll be pretty straightforward, arguably pretty MATLAB heavy but not bad. If you get a bad group you'll find yourself shouldering a large portion of the work alone. In addition, the groups are 10 people, so unless you somehow have 9 friends taking the class with you, you're going to have a few slackers. Good luck! Overall: Don't get complacent and think this is 102 pt.2. While in some ways it is, it's a bit less intuitive if you don't practice. Make sure to keep up with both recorded and live lectures. If you fall behind, it's hard to learn the material all at once, as there's a lot of nuance.
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