Alberto Malinverno

I took EESC 2200 in Summer A (2021). It was a pretty quick time period since it was only half a semester, but Professor Tolstoy is AMAZING. She's so understanding and a great lecturer and the discussion sections we had were very interesting. One of the best professors I've had at Columbia. Highly recommend taking a course with her. Professor Malinverno is also very good at lecturing and teaching, a bit slow but with 1.5 speed it's fine. Very understanding and amazing professor. Both professors are very approachable and are not intimidating at all. They're both very kind and knowledgeable and seem to care about the class's understanding and progress in the course. 10/10 recommend

A miserable experience. The professors simply read from the lecture slides and labs are a disaster. The TAs who run the lab are ill-prepared and it takes up an insane amount of time. The text (Earth: Portrait of a Planet) is helpful and dumbed down but tests are based on the lecture slides. It is important to STUDY THE LABS for the final, which mostly consists of the questions from three labs. If you attend class religiously and get the labs down, you *might* have a shot at doing well. Also, the field trip will be boring and useless--be prepared.

I learned a good deal of Matlab coding in this course. I also think many of the homework problems were on topics that will remain relevant to me for my research. I particularly liked how much time we spent on spectral analyses.

This class is dry, boring, and poorly organized....seriously. Let's get real here, it takes a pretty stellar professor to make the study of rocks and plate tectonics interesting; however, don't come into this class expecting that. While both profs who teach the class are very sweet and seem to care very much about the students, the lectures are painful. The lecture format is about 50-80 slides a class with pictures and diagrams copied from the text book and bullet points taken directly out of the text. I suppose this is nice because it gives you the option since you can succeed either by reading the text or attending the lectures, both is completely unnecessary. However, the class size is small enough that by about the second week they know who each student is and who does/does not attend lecture. Problem set were more like mind puzzles to figure out the answer, once you got it you couldn't believe how simple the answer was. The mandatory lab which is associate with the class is HORRIBLE. Every week attendance is taken even though its all done on the computer, generally it's typing number into excel and making graphs or searching for the answers online using google. This wouldn't be all that bad except for the fact that the directions go in circles so what is expected is very unclear. Consequently, everyone in the entire lab gets a horrible grade, I think most of my labs were…

Statistical techniques for data science such as hypothesis testing, Fourier analysis, interpolation, regression, and more

I learned various data analysis methods and how they would be applicable to geoscience datasets.

I had a math deficiency, and this course was helpful as an introductory course to widely used data analysis methods. As a result, I now have a better understanding of linear algebra, statistics, and Matlab coding applied to natural sciences.

This course was very useful. The quantitative skills I learned (eg. statistics and linear algebra) as well as computation skills (eg. python) are useful for research.

Quantitative data analysis- Fourier transforms, empirical orthogonal functions, least squares, spectral analysis.

A variety of statistics and data analysis methods that feature prominently in the earth sciences, along with the strengths and weakness associated with each method.