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.

I'll try to split my review into an objective part and subjective part.

Objectively, Vasili does not have the time for this course. He's a pretty prominent UCLA figure, so I can imagine that trying to teach such a demanding course is next to impossible without the time to do it. 90% of the course material is recycled from past years, some stuff is over a decade old. The other 10% is half completely new stuff, half old-stuff with a small revision or twist. Objectively, the homework is brutal. Even if you truly understand most of it, it is very tedious. One problem, as mentioned, was literally about 10 pages of equations. The tests are a bit strange themselves. The layout has been mentioned (the gimme problem, the tedious, the thinking)... to go into more depth--the gimme is a rehash of something done in class, typically a homework problem. Bring the right pages (you can use any piece of info on the tests, except for the internet) and it is a freebie. The tedious it just that--tedious. The thinking problem has some trick to it--some manipulation of old equations in the course.

Subjectively, this is leaps and bounds the worst class I have taken in my life. I have had professors with heavy accents, professors who put minimal effort, professors who make things unnecessarily hard. Vasili's class is a sick beast of its own. The man CANNOT teach. He showed up about 15 minutes late the first lecture. Not punctual. He simply told us to google how to perform a Laplace Transformation when it came up in the course. Not patient (LT is actually something you possibly haven't seen before this course due to the lack of course requirements for it). His mind is scattered, and he will not devote any time into the course outside of the 4 hours per week for the lectures. It truly is a skeleton of a demanding and tough class. You can see I have pretty strong feelings about the course-- mainly because I passed with a grade I didn't deserve because I didn't learn ANYTHING in the class. I answered a *piece* of 1/3 questions of the final exam, and get by with my grade? That's bull. Vasili is a smart veteran engineer with raw experience, but teaching what you know is a different beast than knowing it. He will not walk you through his thought process for a problem, more like just do the problem while narrating what he's doing. "Take this, perform Laplace Transform. Google if you don't know how to do it. Use Axiom 56 from my handout. This cancels. *writes on part of the board no one can see*. And there is your answer. *scrolls to next problem* Start with Axiom 34..."

Obviously, others had a better time in this class than I did. Maybe he was funny during lectures, but I stopped going after the first 5 or so. Those 4 hours are a precious resource for completing the homework. If you're an absolute genius, maybe you'll learn a lot from this course--you could impress people by deriving some fundamental equations using math alone (which, by the way, is the focus of the class. I felt that seldom we would actually show how the stuff we're learning applied in the real world--we would just derive an equation graph it, and be done). Me, as an average joe, did not gain anything from this class, save for some coding experience in Excel. If possible, do not take this course.

Many people hate this class, overall I had a good time and did not spend much time on the HW or studying.

Most important note do not get the book or even read a page of it. It is all a waste of time, Vasili makes all his own problems. Also go to discussion they are not graded, but TA's give out HW answers and explain why the answer are true to save time on the HW.

Grading Scheme
HW (4 assignments, each 8.75%): 35%
Midterm: (Only one in week 5): 30%
Final: 35%

First off each HW is over 30 pages of typed math equations, so learn math type and key board short cuts for math symbols at the beginning of the quarter to save time. He has not changed the HW problems for the last 4+ years and gives a PDF solution manual after they are due. Many people chose to find someone who took the class and download all 4 solution manuals in the past to get the manuals from them. Because so many people have the solutions you need to get almost 100% on all HW assignments to compete with the curve. If you do not understand a step in the HW it probably doesn't matter half the HW would never be on the test either way focus on getting the good HW grade, but if u want to know ask the TA's not him. I did the HW during TA's OH so every time I had a question I could get it answered right away and made sure I was going down the right path. By doing this I only spent 10 hours on each assignment which is only 5 hours per week cause each assignment is 2 weeks long. Also being good at MATLAB saves a lot of time and you should take M20 as a co-req for this class.

As for the midterm all test are open note so you can print all the handouts and HW you completed and use them on the test. The midterms are three questions an easy, a thinking, and a tedious. The easy one you should get if you understand the most basic concepts of Thermo, the tedious was seen before on a practice test he gave out so make sure you do the practice test, the thinking one is just pure luck, it will look like a lot of math but some trick will allow all equations to cancel and it become very easy. Make sure you look at all the constraints and what is physical possible to eliminate a lot of equations to start with. By doing this and a lot of luck I got 100% on the midterm.

The final was much harder than the midterm. The easy question was a HW problem and because I brought all my HW to the test I got that one. The other two I spend the next 2.5 hours working on and wrote 11+ pages but it could have all been wrong, the key is to find what equation he is looking for and then just take a best guess and write a ton cause if anything looks correct they give out partial credit.

Overall by doing well on the HW and midterm and winging the final I got an A+. As for studying spend less time on the HW (Just get it done however you chose) and make sure you know when to use each equation because by choosing the correct equation you can at least get partial credit which will make or break your grade. I loved my winter quarter and had little work, so despite the rest of the reviews I enjoyed this class especially in the last 3-4 weeks. This is because after the midterm the HW is mostly crazy non-sense so
the TA's gave out almost all answers because they felt bad for us and you don't really need to attempt to understand the HW.

Vasili, great guy, super funny, very insightful. But this class was demonic. If you don't have to take this class, do yourself a favor and don't take it. I think it's pretty clear from the reviews that 102A homework will become your absolute worst enemy. The tests, I felt, sometimes had little to do with material actually taught and I found myself asking, "Would I have gotten a worse grade if I didn't study?" and answering that with, "Probably not". If you do take this class, prepare to be completely lost in the material and where you stand in the class. This class was something of a twisted psychology experiment and I'm sure you will find your true friends at the end of this journey lol.
But Vasili... hilarious, genius, fantastic person, if you can get to hear a few things he says, consider yourself blessed.

Study his handouts, that is what the test is based off of and he is a brilliant guy.

Vasilios is the best! He's a cool professor who knows his stuff. Mercedes gave him a free Merc Fuel Cell car for something he did for them. He's really chill and there's an 80% chance you'll end up with an A.

Course Taken: Intro to ChemEngineering

At first, I thought this professor was way beyond our level. After taking his course and finishing the final, however, I noticed that he understood that students needed to be challenged and he was preparing the students for upper division engineering courses. His office may be a little bit...messy... but go to his office hour if you do not understand certain parts of the lecture. Form a group and approach him if you don't want to feel intimidated, but overall, he is a good professor.

For finals, focus and CLEARLY understand your homework. Our final was based only on the homework. Good luck!

This is literally one of the only few professors whose lectures are worth attending. Seriously, he's the best ChemE Professor hands down, if not the only good ChemE professor at UCLA(which is a shame).

I've taken 102A and 100 with him, both great experiences. He even taught fluid flow material better than the 101A course did, (whats up with that?)

He is the best because:
1. Knows his stuff, doesnt have fancy/wimpy lecture notes to look off of
2. Extremely concerned if the class is understanding the material
3.Although he can be very scary looking sometimes, he is EXTREMELY APPROACHABLE, and definitely urges students to do so.
4. Explains the concepts of whats going on using good analogies; not just writing equations and saying, okay and then dee-you divided by dee-tee equals dee-pee times vee"
5. I actually took the time to create and account to rate him positively just to show how great he is. He really puts other professors to shame.

At first he may seem hard because he introduces all the math background, and as you know, the greek letters get thrown around every where in math and science, meaning anything from course to course, So dont be intimidated, you'll get it eventually.

One more thing, READ HIS PAMPLHETS AND NEVER THROW THEM AWAY!!!!

LECTURE: Horrible lecturer. Just awful. He makes things that are supposed to be relatively easy insanely hard due to his enormous mathematical background. It takes a ton of time to even understand what he is talking about. He doesn't mention what sections of the book he is using and he just says the book is terrible, when really it is much clearer than he is.

Don't get me wrong though, Vasili is a super smart guy, I don't think anyone will tell you otherwise. He can give a lecture with no lecture notes - he knows his stuff back and forth. He is just really, really bad at explaining things.

HOMEWORK: Lots. Actually very useful, but can be tedious and time consuming.

HANDOUTS: Good lord, the pamphlets! They're actually pretty useful too, but they're basically a reflection of his lectures: super long, complicated, and hard to understand beneath all the math jargon. For one of them you get "The Axiomatic Approach to Thermodynamics", a 30 some page handout of straight math BS from first principles. The key points in this pamphlet could probably be summed up in a page, tops - But instead, Vasili compiles them into a nearly 100 axiom long ultra-tedious and brutal math exercise, for example deriving and comparing arcane things such as Pfaffian differentials in abstract variable spaces.

TESTS: He typically has three problems on each test with lots of parts to each problem. One "gimme", one "tedious", and one "that separates the A+ from the A-". In my experience with this class, the difficulty of the problems are not so clear cut, but are about the same as the homework. Grading is generous though.

PERSONALITY: Vasili is an approachable and very nice person who is very interested in the material. He'll always help you out.

OVERALL: Hard, tedious, time consuming class. You'll need to teach yourself A LOT, unless you're a genius and can actually follow any of the garbage Vasili writes on the board or tries to explain from the pamphlet. This is more like a class that a graduate student would take after taking several introductory Thermo Classes - literally everything is derived from first principles, and you don't need to do that for an undergraduate, entry level Thermo class. I do not recommend Vasili as a professor, but since you're a ChemE, you'll probably have no choice.

I must say I have to disagree with some of the reviews in the post below:
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Lectures: Professor Vasili has a tremendous mathematical background. So expect a lot of mathematics in this class. Having said that, it is up to you to decide whether an engineering class should or should not be math-heavy. My personal view (shared by many) is that while this class might seem to be too much math, it is essentially making you dig down to the very fundamentals of thermodynamics and from there on, build theorems and come to conclusions that the textbook has merely stated.

Homework: Homework assignments are huge (35% of grade). However, Prof Vasili is accommodating with due dates - that makes it better. Most of your learning in this class will come from doing homework. You are made to combine thermodynamics with mathematics- not just take equations from textbooks, plug numbers in and print results.

Exams: Fair, graded generously. Mostly based on homework.

All in all, this is a great class. It seems a little too much in the beginning, but as the quarter progresses, it gets better. Don't let the homework overwhelm you.
His pamphlets are rich with information. You don't need to memorize anything for this class. (Except maybe "GENERATION = IN + OUT - ACCUMULATION").

There is absolutely no question that this is a very different class - it is something you would expect in an engineering-heavy school. And that, I believe, is good.

Again, for all the hard work you do, grading is very generous.

At the end of the class, you will appreciate the fact that you took a class that was in so many ways different than most classes taught here at UCLA. Take it.