Professor
Heather Maynard
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Most Helpful Review
She taught directly out of the book and didn't explain things in even remotely scientific terms. She actually didn't explain anything. The whole class was a bunch of "This attacks here, and then this attacks here, and then this attacks here, and then this falls off. Any questions?" And of course there weren't any because it's pretty straight-forward when you don't have to actually understand it. So if you like memorization, great, you're love her. If you like hearing about electronegativity and pKa and all those other reasons WHY reactions happen, then take Merlic instead. Yes, her exams are a lot easier, but because of that there's pretty much no partial credit and the curves are really high. Also she curves based on a C+, though I'm not sure that's uncommon. So just make sure you're two standard deviations better than your peers before you take her class. She has a lot of energy, which was really amusing, but overall I got very little from the class.
She taught directly out of the book and didn't explain things in even remotely scientific terms. She actually didn't explain anything. The whole class was a bunch of "This attacks here, and then this attacks here, and then this attacks here, and then this falls off. Any questions?" And of course there weren't any because it's pretty straight-forward when you don't have to actually understand it. So if you like memorization, great, you're love her. If you like hearing about electronegativity and pKa and all those other reasons WHY reactions happen, then take Merlic instead. Yes, her exams are a lot easier, but because of that there's pretty much no partial credit and the curves are really high. Also she curves based on a C+, though I'm not sure that's uncommon. So just make sure you're two standard deviations better than your peers before you take her class. She has a lot of energy, which was really amusing, but overall I got very little from the class.
Most Helpful Review
Winter 2025 - Tl;dr: Take this class if you want an interesting professor and if you're good at studying, not if you need more support. Maynard is just ok. I don't think she deserves the bad rap from the other reviews, but you will be studying a lot with her. Going to discussion section is really important because the TAs will explain mechanisms in more detail than she does. Also, we covered polymers instead of UV/Vis spectroscopy and biomolecules (both of which Dr. Ow covers), which is kind of a let down. Maynard does care about her students, but they aren't her first priority. She does lots of fancy and important research in drug development, which made her office hours and her final lecture very interesting, but research is more important to her than teaching. She paid the textbook company, Cengage, for her slides, instead of making her own, which didn't affect the quality of her lectures, but it did make it clear that she didn't care to dedicate the time to make her own, more detailed slides, or even ask another Chem 30C prof to use theirs. Dr Ow's Chem 30C slides are much more comprehensive than hers, and his lectures are better at explaining things. Maynard's lectures consisted of her explaining the mechanism in the first half and then doing practice problems during the second half, which was ok, but if you didn't understand the mechanism when she first explained it. She and the TAs will go around and help you with the practice problems, which is nice if you want a lot of face time with a very influential prof to get a letter of rec from her. The grading scheme was 30% Midterm 1, 30% Midterm 2, and 30% Midterm 3 with no final exam. It's pretty unforgiving and Maynard is a stickler for the UCLA policy of not making accomodations without a doctor's note. On the bright side, since the TAs only have one test to grade at a time, they return grades really quickly, within 2 days. Also, the light amount of grading makes the TAs a lot happier to be there than for classes with more things to grade, so they are generally happy to help you out in discussion section and office hours. Shout out to Katie Zhu for being one of the coolest TAs I've had at UCLA. Also, Maynard is so busy with her research and her lab is so well-funded that she has a personal assistant, so if you want to meet with her privately, you'll have to go through her personal assistant to make an appointment. I will say that Maynard is nice and she does care. She is not the frigid and aloof research professor that you may fear; she is very approachable. Teaching is just not a priority for her.
Winter 2025 - Tl;dr: Take this class if you want an interesting professor and if you're good at studying, not if you need more support. Maynard is just ok. I don't think she deserves the bad rap from the other reviews, but you will be studying a lot with her. Going to discussion section is really important because the TAs will explain mechanisms in more detail than she does. Also, we covered polymers instead of UV/Vis spectroscopy and biomolecules (both of which Dr. Ow covers), which is kind of a let down. Maynard does care about her students, but they aren't her first priority. She does lots of fancy and important research in drug development, which made her office hours and her final lecture very interesting, but research is more important to her than teaching. She paid the textbook company, Cengage, for her slides, instead of making her own, which didn't affect the quality of her lectures, but it did make it clear that she didn't care to dedicate the time to make her own, more detailed slides, or even ask another Chem 30C prof to use theirs. Dr Ow's Chem 30C slides are much more comprehensive than hers, and his lectures are better at explaining things. Maynard's lectures consisted of her explaining the mechanism in the first half and then doing practice problems during the second half, which was ok, but if you didn't understand the mechanism when she first explained it. She and the TAs will go around and help you with the practice problems, which is nice if you want a lot of face time with a very influential prof to get a letter of rec from her. The grading scheme was 30% Midterm 1, 30% Midterm 2, and 30% Midterm 3 with no final exam. It's pretty unforgiving and Maynard is a stickler for the UCLA policy of not making accomodations without a doctor's note. On the bright side, since the TAs only have one test to grade at a time, they return grades really quickly, within 2 days. Also, the light amount of grading makes the TAs a lot happier to be there than for classes with more things to grade, so they are generally happy to help you out in discussion section and office hours. Shout out to Katie Zhu for being one of the coolest TAs I've had at UCLA. Also, Maynard is so busy with her research and her lab is so well-funded that she has a personal assistant, so if you want to meet with her privately, you'll have to go through her personal assistant to make an appointment. I will say that Maynard is nice and she does care. She is not the frigid and aloof research professor that you may fear; she is very approachable. Teaching is just not a priority for her.
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