OT: Hardest class at U-M?
I saw the "Easiest class at U-M?" post and thought that some might find the opposite question interesting.
My hardest class? "Dynamics of Mechanical Systems" I think it was M.E. 340. That (and M.E. 240, come to think of it) just didn't "click" for me. Interestingly, most of my classmates did not share my opinion. They typically chose Fluids or Heat Transfer.
My easiest? A 100-level (Social) Psychology course. It was interesting and almost laughably easy. I took it during my senior year.
I had ME 240 with Perkins. Easily the best Prof I had at Michigan. He made the class click for me and made it make sense.
Multivariable calc...totally forget the catalog number, but it was my first class of college. Just couldn't get it.
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Different strokes for different strokes I guess. I thought Linerar algebra was relatively fine. It was Calc III where they made you do all the 3-dimentional crap that completely baffled me.
orgo chem your first semester freshman year
Eventually things will start to click and get easier once the underlying concepts start coming together. But getting to that point is no easy task.
me too...first exam ever at UM was orgo, and I got a D. I did much better on everything after it, but man did I quickly get a reality check that living the college live wasn't absolutely compatable with scholastic achievment. On a side note, my wife got an A+ in all levels of organic chemistry...over-achiever
was in Calc II, which I had APed into (most likely shouldn't have) and I think I got a D as well. Scared the living crap out of me. Wasn't that I didn't study, I just had been brute forcing myself through calc for a while and didn't really understand what was really going on.
I never really mastered calc, but I did salvage my grade in the class. Not sure I ever had to work harder in a class in my life to dig out of that hole.
I don't know if it was the absolute worst but it was definitely up there. Half the time on exams you were just praying the mean would be around 50%.
EECS 482 - Operating Systems.
I never stood a chance.
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Regardless of the class difficulty, this class was the most important class I took at U of M for my career. When I'm interviewing U of M graduates, I ask them about this course. It's one of the only classes there that exposes you to a class of problems that you're likely to encounter in the real world, especially if you do systems programming (as I do). This class may have kicked your ass, but I guarantee you're a better programmer for it.
Totally agree. Was the first class I struggled in at UM. Getting a 19 on the midterm was a big wake up call, but it was also the class I learned the most in.
Totally agree with how critical this class is. Midway through my time in EECS, they revamped the CSE curriculum and made it optional, which I never understood. A CS grad who never took operating systems is like a med school grad who never took anatomy.
Didn't like nachos?
I thought 482 was relatively easy and fun... although I must have slacked, because my grade wasn't that good.
prof chen is the truth tho
I had a materials course that I think was an ME requirement taught by an Indian prof whose name I can't remember. I actually really liked the professor and the material wasn't all that bad, he just had high demands. Also vector calculus first semester of college was a rude awakening.
I found heat transfer to be the most intuitive course I took in ME.
It wasn't overbearingly difficult, but it was definitely not easy and it is dry to the point where no matter how much I keep up with the subject it never comes up at a family function, but Neuropsychopharmacology, which I had with Terry Robinson, I believe, was a very dense course in the sense that I don't think you could have crammed more information into that...or onto the tests for that matter. Nightmares about things like acetylcholine inhibitors and their mechanisms to this day.
EECS 281 fucked me right up.
EECS 281 was also my first thought. In retrospect, I'm not sure how hard it actually was, but (despite my professor's claims to the contrary) they definitely used this course as a "filter" course to weed out people who really weren't cut out for a CS major. It's the first class where you encounter "real" CS problems on the algorithmic level, not just trying to learn some syntax and grammar. That's a difficult leap to make.
I feel like 281 sucks if you haven't yet found the "programming mindset".
But then again, I took 281 after I did 215 and 216, average was like a 40% on those tests
I would have to go with EECS 280. As an electrical engineering requirement and no way to test out of it, the class had a wide mix of people with programming experience and many, like myself, who had only used a computer to chat on AOL with babes. Needless to say, I was ecstatic for my C+ in the class after spending 20 hours a week on the homework for a 4 credit class.
The only prerequisite, at least at the time I took it, was eng 101. We learned how to have the command prompt display things like "I love umich football" using the 'cout' command. The class hardly did anything to prepare you for 280, though.
To add to its claim of hardest class, I had heard that it had the lowest average gpa of any course at UM. I didn't see any data to confirm that, but from the misery my classmates seemed to be in, too, I could believe it.
Yeah, I remember taking it. I had a class of programming at UM-Flint before I transfered. Took it my second semester... I wish I had taken EECS 183 before hand - definitely wasn't ready for it. I ended up gettting a B, but I busted my ass for it. And I was a CS major. Unless you've gotten a 4 or 5 on the AP CS exam, you should definitely take 183. I thought the pre-req when I took it was 183 or prior programming experiences.
Then I took 281 next semester which was insane. I had to drop it after I couldn't finish the first project (1 of 3 at the time). I took it the following semester and it had been switched to 6 smaller projects and was much more doable. Still very tough.
My whole CS experience would have been much better if I had taken 183. They really should required it.
The prereq when I took it was ENG103... which was Fortran programming.
I'm a hardware guy (and we didn't have 281) - but I found 280 and 380 (half the current 281, half the current 381) to be relatively easy... but I also had a good bit of programming experience before college.
EECS 280 was the first class that made me realize I hated Electrical Engineering and actually wanted to be a computer programmer. :) Of course, back when I was at Michigan, the CS department wasn't even part of the engineering school.
Now you have your choice
You can get a Computer Science degree from EECS.
You can get a Computer Science degree from LSA.
Basically you get to choose whether you want your non-CS stuff to be engineering or liberal arts.
Looking back, I probably should have done it through LSA. However, the rigorous work the calculus and physics classes provided definitely made me a better student in general.
I'm so glad I got my CS degree from the engineering school rather than from LSA. There's a decent amount of cache attached to being able to say that you have an engineering degree.
if I had had that choice I definitely would have been a CS major. But with CS only being a LSA degree when I was at school, I ended up being a EE major for no good reason and then took every CS class that I could for my electives. I've spent my entire career in CS. Honestly, I shouldn't have even gone to Michigan--I should have gone somewhere that had a better CS program when I went to school--I just stupidly didn't realize I wanted to do CS until after I got to college. Looking back it should have been obvious, but I thought I wanted to be an EE like my dad.
How long ago was this?
I did CS-LSA. This allowed me to double-major in math as well as take some humanities I really was interested in. I loved it. The CS requirements in LSA and Engin are exactly the same. I think the only difference was the in Engineering you had to take Engin 101 and the Calc based Physics. That was it. All the CS requirements were exactly the same, so from the perspective of your major, there was no difference.
Also, the CS program is extremely highly regarded program... Nothing to shake your head at. There's a reason just about every EECS class has been mentioned in this thread.
I was the exact opposite...
Worst project grade: 96%
Final Class grade: C+
Yes, those 1-credit, 4-hour physics labs were very much out of sync with the rest of the credit-hour work-load scheme. Just ridiculous. I remember freshman year spending more time on my labs than on my 4-credit (or 3?) Great Books classes. And a lot of the lab work was just busy work.
1 credit lab classes were the norm. I thought the Great Books classes were designed to be easy. They just made sure we got a little culture.
Surprised by how many engineers (and ME's at that) are blogging.
My lowest grades as an undergrad were in the two classes that I ended up teaching most as a graduate TA - MSE 250 and ME 210.
As an undergrad, MSE 250 was tough if you didn't have a good TA. The class required a lot of rote memorization and pattern identification, as well as understanding a lot of equations - kind of like combining the worst parts of Art History and Calculus.
As a graduate, it was probably a PhD level course in Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos. Fun class, but tough. The professor who taught it (Steve Shaw) was only at UM for a few years before returning to MSU.
I'm taking Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos right now and it is by far more work than any other class I have taken here. But it's also super interesting and one of my favorite courses so far, so definitely glad I decided to take it.