I wanted to write this post becuase back when I was an underclassmen and confused about what classes to take, I really scoured the web for reviews of certain classes and professors and would’ve found such posts immensely helpful. However, I must give the disclaimer that these reviews are based on just my own experiences and biases and may not be representative of the class experience for other people. Furthermore, it’s been several years since I’ve taken some of these classes so my memory is a little hazy. I will be reviewing (mostly) STEM classes as I feel most qualified to judge those, and I think my course plan follows that of a student interested in ML.
Overall: 6/10 By this point, there are literally tens of thousands of students that have taken this class, and the class itself is a pretty well-oiled machine. I personally didn’t like the class relative to other CS classes because I thought that the test questions were incredibly contrived though I understand the necessity. Given how big tests are weighed in CS classes, this was a big factor for me. Other than that, I enjoyed the projects and other aspects of the class and had to take it for my major.
Overall: 6/10 All I can recall
Overall: 7/10
Overall: 6/10
Overall: 5/10
Overall: 7/10 I don’t exactly remember why I decided to take this class; I think I was still entertaining the idea of pre-med freshman fall and a quantitative physics-based biology class seemed interesting enough. The class consisted of six homework assignments and a take-home midterm and final where most questions involved some quantitative modelling of a nervous system (generally into a differential equation) and then observing the behavior of your model. I actually found the material very interesting, and it goes into a lot of Nobel-winning work that I never knew about. As it’s most likely that people who read this are CS-focused, no, I don’t think this helped me at all in any connections between biology and neural networks, but it was interesting nevertheless. In another life, I might’ve gone further into this field. One negative experience I have about this class though, was that I don’t think I interacted with a single other student throughout the entire class. As I wasn’t a bio student and I don’t think anyone else was a freshman, I didn’t really have any collaborators for the class which made it less enjoyable than it could’ve been.