Tag: faculty interaction

[383-389] The professor for material science is actually brand new. He has never taught. He has been in industry for the past 20 years. And so, this is his first time teaching, at my institution or anywhere. I really like that class, because I’m going into mechanical engineering. So, his teaching style, it’s kind of like starting over, because he doesn’t know us. But he’s actually done an incredible job of relating this to the real world and to our specific areas of study as well. We were talking about strain and stress and field strength and how things break, under either tension or compression or tension … I forget. Anyway.

[390-395] So, we talked about real life examples of where this was a problem with the Titanic or the shuttle that went down upon re-entry. So, they went up, I forgot what that was called, and then, when they came back down, it exploded. And just a number of other examples. He worked in aerospace, so that’s why he uses those examples. So, a lot of his examples have to do with spaceships and planes and that kind of stuff. Spaceships, sorry, shuttles and those kinds of things. Spaceships are not real. But, anyway.

[396-404] So, he’ll bring up an example of how that happened in real life. Then, we get to ask questions about that and go into detail of, okay, so, what is the exact process of why this failed. Because he’s worked in industry for so long, he’s done a great job of relating what we’re learning in our textbook to real world examples. And that’s something we have definitely been looking for, because it’s really hard to learn about things over and over again. It doesn’t feel useless, but it’s just hard to apply it when you have not been in industry. And it’s nice to know that these things do have real world applications for like when we will use this later on.

[23-30] Coming back from [short] term, I was having a hard time adjusting back to being in America. Both time zone wise because it was 11 hours difference, which means I had just flipped my schedule 180 starting at the end of the beginning of January and then flipped it back at the end of January, which was a lot of change. And jumping with the 11 hour time difference, jet lag, going from jet lag to straight classes was really hard this semester. And this time I had another new professor and she’s not quite as good at teaching.

[262-296] This professor just graduated with her PhD. And I don’t fully understand this, but I think it was while she’s getting her masters, she was teaching eighth grade math or science or something. And so, her teaching style is currently, it’s been so long since she’s been an undergrad that she kind of forgets how difficult it’s supposed to be. And so sometimes she goes over our heads, but at the same time it’s basically she just doesn’t know what level we’re at. And so, she will explain how to convert from gigawatts to kilowatts over a span of five minutes and then just zoom past a brand new concept that we’ve never heard of. I’m like, “Okay, I know how to multiply by powers of 10. You didn’t need to explain that.” And then also just assigning homework on a daily basis, like assigning each problem on a daily basis as opposed to letting you solve them. It basically feels like she’s running it as an eighth grade classroom where she has to control every step of the process. And the goal of engineering is not to have people babysit you through every single step. As undergrads, we’re trying to learn these things on our own. So, it’s a little frustrating.

So it’s been a little frustrating because we go to class and we don’t really learn anything, because it takes an hour to get through one simple concept or one practice problem. Yeah, I don’t know. She didn’t really need to go into their practice problem or just any question we ask, she gets nervous about answering it. And so, if we question, we say, “Hey, I think you missed a step here, or this is a calculation error.” She’s like, “Oh.” She freaks out, and then goes all the way back to square one and thinks that all of her notes that she made for this lecture are wrong. Which is really hard because I’m like, “No, we’re not questioning your entire intelligence. You can pause, think about the question, answer the question, and then keep going.” So, that’s been very time consuming.

[318-349] As for my not engineering classes, they’re going pretty well. They already offer online versions of those. So, that’s been pretty good. Let’s see, I’m taking chemistry two, college chemistry two. It’s a tier B elective so I have to take, I think it’s 20 credits in other sciences. So math, biology, chemistry, I can’t take physics cause I’m already taking so many physics classes, those don’t count. Yeah, so math, biology or chemistry. And I chose chemistry two because I’ve already taken chemistry one. And so far, I’m not doing as well as I was last semester and it’s not coming as naturally. But I appreciate how she teaches. She’s a tenured professor so she has lots of experience teaching the same class over and over again and is really good at it. She schedules her classes so that there’s lots of classroom interaction, despite there being a hundred people in the class. She has the roster in front of her with our pictures and she will find you and flat out ask you questions in the middle of class and make you answer them in front of everyone. And then if you’re wrong, there’s no judgment. She’s just like, “Okay, we’re going to walk through this.” And it stimulates learning.

We have, we use an online tool called Chem 101. They might have other like physics 101 too, I’m not sure what this company has. But for chemistry 101 she has the ability to create in-class quizzes and in class worksheet or work through problems with multiple choice answers and she commonly has us work with the people next to us. We’ll solve it on our own and then work with people next to us. So, this is really great because it covers all the learning styles. So, she’s lecturing, which is the verbal, and then she writes it down, which is visual, and then the hands-on approach or she lets you work out the problems yourself. And then she’ll kind of walk around the classroom and help. And other days she just lectures. And then she has my office hours as well. But because of the way she runs her class, fewer people need to go to office hours because she’s already helped them through. And those in-class participation quiz type things that don’t count towards a grade give her a really good idea of how each student is doing and how the class is doing overall, because it’ll give her all of the statistics. So, I really appreciate that class even though I’m not catching onto it 100%. I mean I still have fine grades in that class and regardless of that, I really enjoy the way that the class is run and I enjoy the content.