EECS 216

216

WN15, Prof. Anastasopoulos

This class was not particularly difficult, but it was easy to get points off on the exams. Half of the exam was multiple choice and half was short answer. On quite a few of the multiple choice questions, if you missed one small thing on your note sheet, you would not be able to answer the question without guessing pretty much. It was pretty disappointing to get an exam back and only do average or slightly below average for those reasons. Do the practice exams and go to discussion. My GSI for discussion was really good, but yours may not be. However, I have not had a bad GSI who led a discussion in EECS yet, so I would probably still recommend discussion.

EECS 230 is an introductory electromagnetic/optics course. It covers transmission lines, electrostatics, magnetostatics, and touches upon time-varying fields. Students learn the fundamentals of wave propagation and high speed interconnect modeling through transmission-line analysis. Electrostatics and magnetostatics cover the underlying principles behind common electrical/electronic systems such as energy storage (eg. capacitor banks) and data storage (eg. magnetic recording) devices, and flat panel LCD displays. The study of time-varying fields explains the operation of wireless energy transfer, motors and generators (eg. wind turbines and regenerative braking systems). What I loved for this course was that the class was 1 hour long each, 4 day a week. So you did have to absorb too much knowledge a day. It was good for me to review. Also, the GSI was really helpful. The workload of the course, I think, was medium. We had 3 exams, 17 homework, 6 labs and several in-class quizzes in total. Since the course did not curve, the material was not difficult if you attended classes regularly and did homework well.

FA15, Prof. Ulaby

This course was really interesting for me. First of all, I finally got to use the Smith Chart. It’s technically for finding complex matching impedances, but it can also be used for impressing your friends because it looks super complicated even though it’s actually really easy to use. The way that the course was structured this semester was four hour-long classes with random pop quizzes, and then two very short homeworks per week. I really liked this because I always had a small, constant workload. I could always plan on spending about 1.5 hours on each homework assignment +- .5 hour. The only thing I didn’t like about this course was that when our second midterm was split into two parts, time was the limiting factor for me for doing well on those exams, whereas on the other exams there was plenty of time.