What classes and professors did you like and dislike at Cal?

looking back i dont think i have ever had a professor or GSI that truly inspired me. To be honest, even in my favorite classes I have trouble paying attention in lecture for more than 5 minutes at a time. For this reason my favorite professors tend not to be particularly adept lecturers. I prefer instructors that give challenging homework problems that highlight interesting concepts (that’s how i learn), but much more basic exam questions. That being said, here are a few of my favorites:

-vaughan jones, math 53: easy midterms and a tough but fair final. Actually this guy was a pretty good speaker and a Fields medalist.
- jan liphardt, physics 7B: i thought he really had a good sense of what was reasonable to expect from his students without being too easy.
-bill miller, chem 120A: has a stream of consciousness style of lecture which is hard to follow, but the homework problems were very rewarding and exams focused on fundamentals. I’m taking 221A with him next semester.
charles harris, chem 122/222: truthfully, lectures were impossible to follow and largely a waste of time. but the class was awesome and i give him credit for that
lek-heng lim, math 110: was very organized. gave very difficult/rewarding homeworks and easy exams
michael klass, math 104: lectures were impossible to follow, but he was an extremely interesting person. chatted with him a few times about nonmath stuff. homeworks were hard and exams were fair.

and some of my least favorite:

andrew charman, physics 7A: had a very distorted sense of what to expect of students. midterm exams each took about 4 hours. his questions generally took up a full page in 10 pt font and were mostly filled with useless details- very frustrating.
ming gu, math 54: kinda in his own world, in lecture and in his exam writing.
peidong yang, chem 104A: used exclusively powerpoint, likely out of laziness, for a class that requires a great deal of problem solving (and thus requires seeing examples for understanding). The class was almost all group theory, but taught in a frustratingly hand-wavy manner- luckily chem 122 filled in the details.
jay groves, chem 120B: everything was taught with applications to biology, which i care little about. homework problems were almost exclusively based on material outside of the text and required a weekly trip to office hours just to know what the hell each question was asking- a huge time burn. i think i would’ve enjoyed this class more i had some statistics background, but the chem dept seems not to think it important. i am taking stat 134 this summer for this reason.
richmond sarpong, chem 112B: an awesome, approachable guy. lectures were very well-organized. his tests were just brutal- consistently the lowest test averages in any class i have taken. luckily the curve was very forgiving.

Givental: I took him for Math 53 my first semester as well. What a nightmare! I swear I didn’t learn a thing in that class. The final scarred me. He had word problems!!! About multivariable calculus!! I’ve never turned in so many blank pages in my life. Everything I know about multivariable calculus was taught to me in my physics E&M class. No thanks Givental!

Still have a year to go but I have to say my favorite professor has been Damon English for Physics 137B. He is one of the few professors that has both talent and the enthusiasm to teach. He tried to learn all our names and relate to us as individuals, gave us problems that were hard but somehow fun to solve, and he would stop what he was doing and come help us whenever we would ask anytime during the day. Very dedicated to his students.

Favorite Professor: Ken Jowitt – PS 2 – made vague concepts accessible – also was right about quite a bit of the post-Soviet world, so he has that going for him.

I actually really liked Dan Garcia. I only had him for CS3 (his very first class at Cal!), but I enjoyed it thoroughly, and it was a great way to start at Cal. It also helped that I got an A+ ;)

The Hits

Rhetoric 1B I can’t remember her name (at Colgate now) but she was very passionate. Bitch of a GSI but my prof wouldn’t let the GSI grade my writing.

Classics 10A Intro to Greek Civilization Griffiths
Classics 10B Intro to Roman Civilization Trevor Murphy. Best Class I Took at Cal. The one class that changed my view of the world the most. Professor Murphy attacked the class. The reading was endless. Wow.
Classics 28 Classic Myths Professor Bullock is on autopilot but the plane lands in Athens.

Spanish Cervantes Goddess of a professor and a pretty good book too.

EE120 Linear Systems Ramchandran Best Engineering Class I took at Cal. Great prof with an incredible amount of work. At the 3 hour midterm, no one left early and the GSIs said to keep working. Tough HW sets.

PoliSci 2 Comparative Politics with Chibber.

EE192 Mechatronics Fearing. My engineering project class. I lived in the lab.

CS61C Dan Garcia. Dan was on crack most of the time. That’s the only explanation.

The Misses

Rhet 10 Good reading, good lectures, multiple choice tests that I finished in 10 minutes. Only easy A I ever got.
Rhet 103A Cohen I sooo wanted to take this but a shitty prof and a shitty GSI convinced me to drop.
EE40 weak prof, great course.
EE117 extremely nice prof who couldn’t lecture. Hostile GSI. Drop.
Math 54. Ming Gu. Kinda useless prof but a beautiful course (I ended up taking someone else).

Advisor

I only met my useless adviser twice. He was playing Worlds of Warcraft and didn’t want to be bothered.

My real adviser was Professor Fearing who I also took for EE 192 Mechatronics, the car class. I was on campus a week ago visiting a buddy in Cory Hall. Suddenly someone said my name. It was Professor Fearing. I about melted. It was such an honor to be remembered by him.

Man, it was so long, I cant remember any of their names and barely any of their mannerisms.

I was a Spring Admit back in 2000 and so I did Extension in 99. My philsophy teacher had a thing where he hated it if people were late. And, if so, hed immediately stop everything once they entered and wait until they were seated. It was hilarious in a painfully awkward sort of way.

I taught a DeCal class. I know there is at least one reader here who took it. Hopefully, they remember good things about that.

The two best lecturers I had were Gary Black for Arch 150 (intro to structures), he had a great sense of giving students just the right amount of information in a lecture to absorb, without overloading them or short-changing the subject matter. The other was Ananya Roy (both ED 100 the far better course and CP 115), I’m not a part of her cult following, but she does deliver a good lecture.

I can’t remember the professor’s name, but he was an old dude from the city and regional planning department. The dude would just rant about current events for an hour and a half every lecture, and he would talk about the same current events every lecture. Therefore the entire course could have been summed up in a 2 hour lecture. He also took attendance everyday, and he was a preacher rather than a teacher. Also, he didn’t actually have class assignments, instead he wanted us to do 2 days of community service. WTF!?!?! I’m not going into debt with student loans to receive a 2 hour lecture and perform community service, it was a COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME! I learned nothing. He is the reason teacher tenure can be a bad thing.

Favorites:
Kinch Hoekstra, PS112B (History of European Political Theory)
This class was great in part because of the reading we got to do: Erasmus, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. It was also great because Hoekstra is incredibly knowledgeable (Dude speaks 4 or 5 languages), but he didn’t really lecture in a way I was expecting; he basically led the class like a big discussion section, guiding us through the major topics and concepts from each thinker. I learned an incredible amount in this class, despite the fact that it was being taught by a new professor.

Thomas Dandalet, History C157 (Renaissance and Reformation)
I loved the topic and the reading for this class, and professor Dandalet is the most amazing lecturer I have ever had. He brings powerpoint slides of the important art from the period, but he never uses notes or anything. He just stands up and lectures for an hour, in a way that is extremely easy to follow and take notes on. He is so thorough on everything he covers that there are virtually never questions. He just answers them before anyone asks. Again, a great class that I learned a lot from.

Least Favorite:
PS3- This is the statistics/polysci class that all polysci majors have to take, and it just sucks. I don’t think it matters who is teaching it, I have met very few people with good things to say about it. Most of us got into political science because we wanted to avoid math, not have more of it.

I loved Alex Filippenko for Astronomy (10, I think, although I took a 2nd course w/him). I ate that stuff up and competed to win the trip to Lick Observatory (I won and went even though I had a fever that night — but dangit I was looking through the world’s 2nd largest optical telescope!!).

Alan Dundes for Folklore (maybe it was in Sociology or something). Fun lectures.

Stephen Booth for an English seminar on poetry asthetics. Tough but changed the way I thought. I wrote a 5 pager on the first couple lines of “Little Boy Blue” and he thought it was great (albeit too wordy!).

I tend to forget the bad profs.

My favs were Ellman for chem 3b, Chang for chem 103, and Saykally for 4b. In Saykally’s class we blew up, in sequence, a nitrogen balloon, hydrogen balloon, and acetylene balloon. The acetylene balloon went off randomly in class due to static electricity and scared the shit out of everyone. On top of that we did a thermite reaction with a donut that the lab assistant couldn’t let go of, so it reacted too long and blew up the vessel it was in.

We weren’t allowed to do any more demos after that.

MCB 62 – Drugs And The Brain w/ David Presti – Fantastic class, although it did make me want to try a lot of the drugs we were studying.
Music 128R – The History of Jazz – Every day I would go to lecture and listen to jazz, all of it good. Then some discussion. At the end I had to write one paper, but it was no big deal. Super-fun.
Philosophy 132 – The Philosophy Of Mind w/ John Searle – Really, really interesting stuff. I wasn’t even enrolled in this class (didn’t want to pay the summer registration fees), but I went to every lecture, and even took the final for fun.
CS61A – The Structure And Interpretation Of Computer Programs w/ Brian Harvey. I really like Scheme. That makes me weird, doesn’t it?
EECS150 – Components And Design Techniques For Digital Systems. I was really surprised how interesting I found this class. I spent more lab time on this class than any other, and really liked it.
CS169 – Software Engineering. In my last semester, I finally got to do a big, big project from start to finish. I led a team of 6 writing a blackjack card counter piece of software.
English102(?) – The History Of The English Language. I find this kind of stuff fascinating.

Math 53 – I hated this class, and I never used anything I learned here, even in other classes. My lowest grade at Cal.
Math 55 – Liked the subject, actually, but I couldn’t understand what the professor (don’t remember his name) was saying. Stopped going to lecture after the first midterm.
CS188 – Artificial Intelligence. The most disappointing class I took at Cal. I thought this would be interesting, but it really, really wasn’t.

Professors I loved:

Richard Walker (Geography of California and Economic Geography). He was hilarious and engaging and definitely changed how I saw the world. I knew nothing about California history, and his class convinced me to major in geography.

Gillian Hart: A South African expatriate who was the master of development studies and perhaps the most challenging teacher I had. She absolutely refused to ever simplify any discussion because that’s how the real world is – complicated and interrelated. I learned the most in her classes and still felt like I only got a very small percentage of the understanding she could have imparted on me.

Professors I did not like:

Whichever ‘professor’ that taught me Calc 1A in the extension program. I already had made a huge mistake taking the class, but I knew I could do calc with a good professor. He was not a good professor, and I nearly flunked.

MCB 61 – Brain, Mind, and Behavior, David Presti — we wrote haikus as an assignment! Mine was chosen and printed on the final.
MCB 62 – Drugs And The Brain w/ David Presti (he’s just awesome)
History 127 — History of California — Kerwin Klein — this was just a really interesting class, we learned about the city water sources, the history of hollywood, how Disneyland and Yosemite are the same, and it was generally great except for his love of Los Angeles :)
Social Cognition with John Kihlstrom. Really cool, if you dig that.

My winning haiku:
O wonderous brain,
So squishy and strange,
I want to poke you

My wife took a class from the econ prof who is like Obamas main woman now on the econ stuff. I wonder if she liked it.

Sociology something-or-other with Dr. Harry Edwards. The highlight was when he brought Harris Barton in to talk about what it’s really like to be a football player. Other than that, every lecture was about the systematic enslavement of blacks in America (even today) and the fact that Edwards was the greatest man to ever walk this earth.

I think my favorite was probably whatever class I took where I learned linear programming. Dr. Godwin Wong – maybe not the absolute best professor, but fun to learn from and really cared if you learned. He also taught a database development class in which a classmate of mine wrote a system to buy and sell used textbooks via a bulletin board system… damnit if in 1990 we hadn’t friggin’ invented eBay / Half.com.

Forms of Folklore with Alan Dundes. Dundes was the best public speaker out of all the professors I’ve ever had. Really an extraordinary storyteller.

Sex, Reproduction and the Law with Joan Hollinger. This is one of the few topics that I have continued to follow after the class ended.

Museum Studies with Rosemary Joyce. My favorite of the three courses I took from her. It was fun visiting the museums and the discussions were thought-provoking.

I don’t know him, but did anyone take a course with Takaki? Seems well-loved by Cal alum.