if you have to take this class, take it w trott!! he's extremely helpful and understanding, always willing to take questions and explain something until you get it. after our first midterm, a lot of us didn't do as well as we wanted, so he curved it 10%+ and made the rest of the exams easier (imo). while exams are open everything, don't take this for granted. you really need to know the material of the class itself to do well. i think it got easier as the course went on bc the experiments we learned about are pretty similar and repetitive. trott assigns a book, but i never read it so i don't think you need to get it to succeed. as long as you put in the work this class should be fine, like i said the prof is there to help as much as possible so don't be intimidated!

Taking this class with him will be very interesting. Some courses are easy but boring but this one is not. It's challenging but is much more interesting than you think. Memorizing things without critical thinking won't guarantee you good grades. Note taking is very important.

This class honestly wasn’t as bad as i expected but I definitely had a really big learning curve with his exams. I figured that I didn’t need to study too much on the first one because it was open book open note and open internet, but I was very wrong and ended up getting below average. For the second midterm I made sure to type up my notes into a google doc as a review and did much better. For the final, I went through the slides and forced myself to explain everything and if I was confused rewatched the lecture until it made sense. I never went to discussion section or office hours but once I figured out how to study for the tests I got 100% on the final. You don’t need to memorize anything, you just need to have a pretty deep understanding of the experiments gone over in class and honestly have a bit of luck.