Professor
Vasilios Manousiouthakis
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Most Helpful Review
There were about 3 homework assignments and those homework even though at first seemed intimidating but it's actually not that bad. Those homework actually helps prepare freshmen engineers to know what's coming in future upper div engineer course. I mean he took one of the generation process of Chem E 100 and do pretty much all the messy stuff and then give it to us. Once you get the homework and the point, it's not that bad. Final Grade: A- --> this is because I did not spend so much time on the homework. All my friends got A and A+ so you should be fine if you do the first and second homework well. The final is kinda confusing because it was the process generation worksheet without all the excel file but then I don't think it really matters so yeah.
There were about 3 homework assignments and those homework even though at first seemed intimidating but it's actually not that bad. Those homework actually helps prepare freshmen engineers to know what's coming in future upper div engineer course. I mean he took one of the generation process of Chem E 100 and do pretty much all the messy stuff and then give it to us. Once you get the homework and the point, it's not that bad. Final Grade: A- --> this is because I did not spend so much time on the homework. All my friends got A and A+ so you should be fine if you do the first and second homework well. The final is kinda confusing because it was the process generation worksheet without all the excel file but then I don't think it really matters so yeah.
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Winter 2020 - This class was utterly brutal, and as the professor himself said, the hardest class you'll ever take in your life. It's a sick beast of its own, and will singlehandedly ruin your Winter Quarter. Don't take this as a tech breadth; the A/A- will not be worth the sheer amount of time and effort expended for this class. The lectures were 2 hour slogs where you'd sit down and watch the professor write math down on the board. No really; Vasily lectured more on math, and esoteric technicalities of math rather than actual thermodynamics for the vast majority of the lectures. The only reason to go to lectures is for the rare times when Vasily actually sets up a homework problem for you, or when he does an example problem that you can both understand and is relevant for exams. Unfortunately, you never know when the lecture is useful, but if it is, it can save you several hours on homework. Somewhat fortunate is that this guy is pretty funny at times, especially when he roasts electric cars, green engineering, chemists, and other stuff not directly related to this class. Now the homework, something that could only have come from the DEPTHS OF HELL. Seriously. We got 4 homework assignments during the quarter, and each is a minimum of 20 pages long, typed in size 11 font. I took a grad level class, Bioengr C101 (taught by the hardest professor in the Bioengineering department), Tang's ChemE 45 class (another dreaded class), and MATLAB along with this class, and this class's demanded more time then those classes COMBINED. Also, while Diff Eqs are not a prerequisite for this class, they were still used extensively in this course, making the course even harder. The homework singlehandedly ruined my quarter. I know of people who did the homework WHILE consulting the solution manual. This class still demanded 20+ hours/week for them, despite them looking at solution manuals. Take a light courseload when you take Vasily's class. While you absolutely have to take it Winter quarter Sophomore year (or if you're a transfer, your 2nd quarter here), you can control the other classes you take concurrently. In particular, taking this class ALONGSIDE ChemE 104a is a really bad idea.
Winter 2020 - This class was utterly brutal, and as the professor himself said, the hardest class you'll ever take in your life. It's a sick beast of its own, and will singlehandedly ruin your Winter Quarter. Don't take this as a tech breadth; the A/A- will not be worth the sheer amount of time and effort expended for this class. The lectures were 2 hour slogs where you'd sit down and watch the professor write math down on the board. No really; Vasily lectured more on math, and esoteric technicalities of math rather than actual thermodynamics for the vast majority of the lectures. The only reason to go to lectures is for the rare times when Vasily actually sets up a homework problem for you, or when he does an example problem that you can both understand and is relevant for exams. Unfortunately, you never know when the lecture is useful, but if it is, it can save you several hours on homework. Somewhat fortunate is that this guy is pretty funny at times, especially when he roasts electric cars, green engineering, chemists, and other stuff not directly related to this class. Now the homework, something that could only have come from the DEPTHS OF HELL. Seriously. We got 4 homework assignments during the quarter, and each is a minimum of 20 pages long, typed in size 11 font. I took a grad level class, Bioengr C101 (taught by the hardest professor in the Bioengineering department), Tang's ChemE 45 class (another dreaded class), and MATLAB along with this class, and this class's demanded more time then those classes COMBINED. Also, while Diff Eqs are not a prerequisite for this class, they were still used extensively in this course, making the course even harder. The homework singlehandedly ruined my quarter. I know of people who did the homework WHILE consulting the solution manual. This class still demanded 20+ hours/week for them, despite them looking at solution manuals. Take a light courseload when you take Vasily's class. While you absolutely have to take it Winter quarter Sophomore year (or if you're a transfer, your 2nd quarter here), you can control the other classes you take concurrently. In particular, taking this class ALONGSIDE ChemE 104a is a really bad idea.
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Spring 2020 - It’s a standard Vasily class: Lectures are 90% math, and 10% concepts.Homework assignments are mostly math with a sprinkling of thermodynamics. Workload occasionally gets heavy at times, but you get a free A. Now as a disclaimer, I took this class during the COVID-19 pandemic. That means I didn’t take any midterms; we only had 3 homework assignments and one project. The first homework was very long, and very tedious. Besides 2 questions that one would normally find in Vasily’s ChE 102A class, one question involved getting hundreds of thousands of data points from NIST, and graphing them. Not the best use of our time, although fortunately, I got 100% by only turning in some of the data (about 300k data points) without graphing anything. The next two homework assignments were much easier, being nerfed versions of ChE 102A homeworks. They, alongside the project, used COMSOL software, which ranged from hard to nearly impossible to use with Remote Desktop. Tl;dr: Workload was insane in the beginning, but lightened off greatly as the quarter progressed. We even got to do homework assignments as groups. 2/3 of the lectures were math lectures, about esoteric technicalities. 1/3 of them were interesting though; we actually learned about cutting-edge Hydrogen technology So I’d recommend doing something else while listening to lecture. If it’s just math, you can tune it out but if the lecture is interesting, you can actually pay attention. Discussions were COMSOL tutorials, which were hard to follow along from Zoom and Remote Desktop. Hydrogen is a free A, but prepare to be utterly slammed from time to time. Lectures are optional and either teach you math or cutting-edge hydrogen technologies.
Spring 2020 - It’s a standard Vasily class: Lectures are 90% math, and 10% concepts.Homework assignments are mostly math with a sprinkling of thermodynamics. Workload occasionally gets heavy at times, but you get a free A. Now as a disclaimer, I took this class during the COVID-19 pandemic. That means I didn’t take any midterms; we only had 3 homework assignments and one project. The first homework was very long, and very tedious. Besides 2 questions that one would normally find in Vasily’s ChE 102A class, one question involved getting hundreds of thousands of data points from NIST, and graphing them. Not the best use of our time, although fortunately, I got 100% by only turning in some of the data (about 300k data points) without graphing anything. The next two homework assignments were much easier, being nerfed versions of ChE 102A homeworks. They, alongside the project, used COMSOL software, which ranged from hard to nearly impossible to use with Remote Desktop. Tl;dr: Workload was insane in the beginning, but lightened off greatly as the quarter progressed. We even got to do homework assignments as groups. 2/3 of the lectures were math lectures, about esoteric technicalities. 1/3 of them were interesting though; we actually learned about cutting-edge Hydrogen technology So I’d recommend doing something else while listening to lecture. If it’s just math, you can tune it out but if the lecture is interesting, you can actually pay attention. Discussions were COMSOL tutorials, which were hard to follow along from Zoom and Remote Desktop. Hydrogen is a free A, but prepare to be utterly slammed from time to time. Lectures are optional and either teach you math or cutting-edge hydrogen technologies.
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