I absolutely loved the previous course in this series (PHYSICS 4AL) and I thought I learned a lot and had a wonderful TA. Derek single handedly ruined this course ( PHYSICS 4BL) for me. It is important to note, that while his grading was very harsh and often took off points that were unexplained as assignment requirements, it was his attitude as an instructor was even worse. He always gave off that nothing was worth his time and the lecture materials he gave at the beginning of class were given as straight emotionless reading off the slides. Whenever anyone in my group had a question he always seemed incredibly bothered to have to respond and would do so in a demeaning manner. Several times when called in to the breakout room, he would say he would come back in several minutes then never did. I lost all motivation to do this course solely because of how unpleasant every lab section is with him in charge. (For clarity this was taken during the pandemic and thus was all online)

--> Fun Class, just avoid this TA.

This class was a mess. Derek was rude (and quite frankly sexist), unaccommodating, and unhelpful. If you get Derek as your TA, switch immediately.

I did not like this class. First of all, know that this class is like 4al - you don't see the professor at all and the TA (and maybe LA) run the class, so it depends a lot on the TA. The class is structured in 2 hour sessions twice a week, with the first 30-60 minutes being a lecure and the last part of the class being time to work on the labs in breakout rooms with your randomly assigned groups. The lectures are confusing and randomly introduce concepts like Fourier transform in like 15 minutes. Luckily, I could rely on other physics/math classes I had taken. However, these classes are not prereqs or suggested or anything, so lots of kids were struggling a lot more. Not only are the concepts unclear, but oftentimes the instructions for the lab are also super vague and I just did not learn much from the labs. This may have been more of an online thing, but my group just muted and didn't turn their cameras on. I tried having my camera on and talking through problems for the first few days, but noboy really reciprocated and it was super forced and awkward so I just kinda stopped. I assume part of the class is geared towards teamwork and whatnot, but that was largely absent from my experience. The TA also took like half an hour to answer simply, one-word-answer questions and would grill us on knowing the concepts (even though like I said the teaching was not ideal with dry/random lectures). Overall, I honestly dreaded this class and I am so glad to be done. 2 units for this much class time that usually overflowed to time outside the class (and I definitely had more background knowledge than the average 4bl student) is very frustrating, and during COVID times it just feels silly to try to make these group projects work with unwilling students, unoptimized curriculum, and class structure that IMO needs a lot of work. Sorry for ranting here but I hope people just know what they're getting into here even though a lot of us have to take it.