Professor
Philippe Sautet
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2019 - If you're taking this class, read the damned book. Like, right now. You're essentially going to have one of two experiences in the class: a) The material is amongst the hardest stuff you'll learn in your ChemE career, requiring pages of proofs complete with out-of-the blue assumptions. There are thousands (no exaggeration) of equations and you must have all of these cryptic orderings of numbers, symbols, and greek letters neatly organized in your head in order to make sense of the problem. b) The class was merely *very* time-consuming. I had both experiences because I only learned the trick to get (b) AFTER the first midterm, hence my grade (2 exams, each is 40%). The trick is to read the book and do all the problems. That's it. Sautet is an alright dude. His life doesn't revolve around teaching. Light-hearted enough. Not very helpful in office hours. Not *truly* a professor of thermodynamics. Just another engineer UCLA slapped with a textbook and said, "Teach this class." As such, he teaches fucking *verbatim* from the book. Lecture is basically a live-reading of the book. If you value lecture, I highly recommend opening up the book while he lectures so you can go in depth about anything you don't get... plus you won't have to take notes since not a single thing he writes isn't in the book. That's alright and all, but the anomaly comes from the fact that *almost every problem in the test is a cut and paste from the book.* This is invaluable knowledge. The quizzes are the same, but this is made clear by Sautet. The secret is that the exams are the same as quizzes except it can be ANY problem from the learned chapters. As you can guess, you can guarantee an A+ in the class by doing all the problems. However... this doesn't trivialize the material. It's hard shit any way you cut it. Book authors know it and mention it numerous times, Sautet knows it since he cannot answer any question beyond the scope of the book, and finding correct answers to the problems is fairly rare. Correct answers require usage of equation 3.112 in tandem with equation 5.3 and a slight assumption of your situation in order to answer part a of problem 8.91. It's impossibly difficult to just prop open the book and answer everything easily. You'll need a source for your answers (I used Chegg) and even then I found ~35% of the answers to be incomplete or wrong. Some sources don't even bother to answer all the questions (there's a pdf floating around with ~60% of the answers) But if you make the effort and complete some 400 thermodynamics problems (each of which can take anywhere from 5 minutes to nearly an hour to answer) you'll get an A. Perhaps that's not even necessary, as I'll admit that I started to answer the problems on my own after the first 20 or so in each chapter. I only learned to do all the problems after I got a low C on the first exam. I read the chapters, studied my lecture notes and did the homeworks. In truth, all of that was a waste of time. If I had spent all that time doing all the *unassigned* problems, I would have done much better. I salvaged myself into a B by doing about half of the problems in the book for the final exam (that's all I had time for...) Another helpful hint is to anticipate which problems are good exam questions. "Why wouldn't limestone decompose well under 400K and 1 bar?" is not a good exam question--it's too open ended. "Predict the equilibrium constant of this rxn @ 400K and 1 bar where the Gibbs free energy is xyz" IS a good exam question. Proofs are also fair game. ***tl;dr*** Do all the problems in the book, and do this early. Project-wise, I highly recommend at least learning how to implement functions and nested loops in MATLAB. You're SOL otherwise. The actual coding isn't too hard, but making sense of the project is the time-eater. Don't waste your time learning MATLAB while this stuff is due. Know the basics, read the book (you guessed it, the project spec is verbatim from the book), and most importantly, look at the book examples. Code using the book's given example statement FIRST to debug your program and THEN input Sautet's numbers. And for the love of god, pay attention to the units. The book switches very fucking often between units and that lost me a lot of time. Sorry for the lengthy review, but I honestly want to break this class. If enough people read this and get perfect exam scores, maybe UCLA will be forced to actually teach thermo. I won't say I didn't learn anything, but it was just needlessly hard and needlessly lazy teaching. I do not blame Sautet as he's a cool guy, but this class needs to be reworked. The extra credit problem asked about what fugacity even *means* which was something we worked with all quarter. We never went over the physical meaning of it in class and I luckily looked it up on Quora out of curiosity. Overall though, it ain't so bad. The resources to learn are there and that's more than I can say for some other classes in the department. 3/5.
Spring 2019 - If you're taking this class, read the damned book. Like, right now. You're essentially going to have one of two experiences in the class: a) The material is amongst the hardest stuff you'll learn in your ChemE career, requiring pages of proofs complete with out-of-the blue assumptions. There are thousands (no exaggeration) of equations and you must have all of these cryptic orderings of numbers, symbols, and greek letters neatly organized in your head in order to make sense of the problem. b) The class was merely *very* time-consuming. I had both experiences because I only learned the trick to get (b) AFTER the first midterm, hence my grade (2 exams, each is 40%). The trick is to read the book and do all the problems. That's it. Sautet is an alright dude. His life doesn't revolve around teaching. Light-hearted enough. Not very helpful in office hours. Not *truly* a professor of thermodynamics. Just another engineer UCLA slapped with a textbook and said, "Teach this class." As such, he teaches fucking *verbatim* from the book. Lecture is basically a live-reading of the book. If you value lecture, I highly recommend opening up the book while he lectures so you can go in depth about anything you don't get... plus you won't have to take notes since not a single thing he writes isn't in the book. That's alright and all, but the anomaly comes from the fact that *almost every problem in the test is a cut and paste from the book.* This is invaluable knowledge. The quizzes are the same, but this is made clear by Sautet. The secret is that the exams are the same as quizzes except it can be ANY problem from the learned chapters. As you can guess, you can guarantee an A+ in the class by doing all the problems. However... this doesn't trivialize the material. It's hard shit any way you cut it. Book authors know it and mention it numerous times, Sautet knows it since he cannot answer any question beyond the scope of the book, and finding correct answers to the problems is fairly rare. Correct answers require usage of equation 3.112 in tandem with equation 5.3 and a slight assumption of your situation in order to answer part a of problem 8.91. It's impossibly difficult to just prop open the book and answer everything easily. You'll need a source for your answers (I used Chegg) and even then I found ~35% of the answers to be incomplete or wrong. Some sources don't even bother to answer all the questions (there's a pdf floating around with ~60% of the answers) But if you make the effort and complete some 400 thermodynamics problems (each of which can take anywhere from 5 minutes to nearly an hour to answer) you'll get an A. Perhaps that's not even necessary, as I'll admit that I started to answer the problems on my own after the first 20 or so in each chapter. I only learned to do all the problems after I got a low C on the first exam. I read the chapters, studied my lecture notes and did the homeworks. In truth, all of that was a waste of time. If I had spent all that time doing all the *unassigned* problems, I would have done much better. I salvaged myself into a B by doing about half of the problems in the book for the final exam (that's all I had time for...) Another helpful hint is to anticipate which problems are good exam questions. "Why wouldn't limestone decompose well under 400K and 1 bar?" is not a good exam question--it's too open ended. "Predict the equilibrium constant of this rxn @ 400K and 1 bar where the Gibbs free energy is xyz" IS a good exam question. Proofs are also fair game. ***tl;dr*** Do all the problems in the book, and do this early. Project-wise, I highly recommend at least learning how to implement functions and nested loops in MATLAB. You're SOL otherwise. The actual coding isn't too hard, but making sense of the project is the time-eater. Don't waste your time learning MATLAB while this stuff is due. Know the basics, read the book (you guessed it, the project spec is verbatim from the book), and most importantly, look at the book examples. Code using the book's given example statement FIRST to debug your program and THEN input Sautet's numbers. And for the love of god, pay attention to the units. The book switches very fucking often between units and that lost me a lot of time. Sorry for the lengthy review, but I honestly want to break this class. If enough people read this and get perfect exam scores, maybe UCLA will be forced to actually teach thermo. I won't say I didn't learn anything, but it was just needlessly hard and needlessly lazy teaching. I do not blame Sautet as he's a cool guy, but this class needs to be reworked. The extra credit problem asked about what fugacity even *means* which was something we worked with all quarter. We never went over the physical meaning of it in class and I luckily looked it up on Quora out of curiosity. Overall though, it ain't so bad. The resources to learn are there and that's more than I can say for some other classes in the department. 3/5.
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