Topics in Networking · Electrical Engineering
Reply to students' emails really slowly. The classroom atmosphere is a bit lifeless
Light workload. 4 homeworks, and one semester-long project (either programming project, research paper, or analysis of a real-world system). If you choose the research paper, it's very easy. Not sure about the other two choices. Midterm and final are impossible unless you're good at memorizing every single detail on every slide, but everyone does poorly, so it's fine.
I had such high hopes for this class. Both professors are current directors at Bell Labs, so you'd think they would be extremely knowledgeable about cloud computing and be able to teach a lot about how what's going on in real-world networking today. But on the first day of class each professor started by saying that teaching is only their hobby --- and boy does it show. Each of them were terrible in their own way. Sabnani seemed like he actually cared and wanted to help students, he just didn't know how to do that in an effective manner. His attempts at stimulating class participation consisted of asking "How many of you have heard of _____?" type questions. But on the rare occasion when students cared enough to ask questions, he would genuinely try to answer them. Thomas Woo, on the other hand, gave the impression that he did not care about students at all. Anytime a student would ask a question, he seemed incapable of understanding why they would even need to ask a question, and treated people like an idiot for needed to ask something. And he completely shut down answers that he disagreed with. Homeworks and tests were a disaster as well. There was terrible communication between both the professors and the TA for the class. This resulted in questions that had nothing to do with any of the material covered in lectures. The problems themselves also defy naming conventions and…