Amber Miller

No. Don't do it! This course title is misleading and you will be pissed when you sit in the class on the first day and have the professor remind you of that fact. It's for non-science majors, yes. But Physics for Poets sounds cool and the title holds the promise of a certain whimsical, imaginative, mysterious, beautiful and metaphysical foray into the way things work in nature and in space. Uh, No. However, you will feel motivated to write poems in this class, since the constant daydreaming you will do makes for great poetry writing. You should pay a little attention, though, because some of what you're ignoring is gonna be on your homework assignment and you can't submit a poem. If you have to take this class, go to every session our lovely TA Robert conducts and he will give you all the answers you need and he'll even repeat them for you if you had been writing a poem or haiku while he was lecturing on the topic the first time. The assignments took a lot of time for many of us, maybe those of us less disciplined poets who yearned for metaphors and analogical thinking to help our tender souls make sense of the profundity of nature and the cosmos as it was presented so unimaginatively on those dang power point slides. And the door always had this moaning whooshing sound when closed. Frightened air was trying to blast its way in or out, always a panicked air blowing through tha…

She knows her stuff, doesnt mean you will. Homework problems are impossibly hard. Exams are really really reaaaaaly hard. If you want to fail, and do so after working your butt off, take this class. I highly recommend shifting to 1401. You wont regret it.

Disregard the reviews from 2 years ago! She teaches alright. She tries hard to make the class interesting by throwing jokes around here and there. However, because the class covers a lot of material, she sometimes would just write down tons of equations and give little explanation. She's very approachable and willing to answer questions.

Amber Miller had a very difficult with this time with this class almost from the beginning... this was her first time teaching a lecture course and the students showed no mercy. *CULPA CENSOR* ...much of the class did not take her seriously from the beginning. The result was that she soon lost control before she really had a chance to prove herself, which she actually did with her cosmic microwave background lecture. For the few students that bothered to attend that lecture she proved herself once and for all to be a competent and accomplished physicist well-deserving of her position at Columbia, but by that point most of the students had decided she was a bimbo and stopped attending class. THis also produced an absolutely atrocious curve, (I think the mean on the final was 202 out of about 450) because a lot of the students just copy each other's homework and as a result don't learn. Ultimately if you get Miller, be prepared to learn a lot from the textbook because she is not very good at explaining things. I think that if she gets a class that is more respectful she would do better, but she still needs a bit more experience to learn how to infuse some life into the material. She is too dependent on formulas at the expense of concepts, a major pet peeve of mine.

Forget previous reviews that say how easy it is and what a perfect course it is if you're trying to get your requirement done or boost your GPA. With Dr. Amber Miller, this 1000-level elementary course transforms into some 3000-level intermediate course, and she teaches you physics more than you wish you knew or in other words, more than it is required of you to know and no decent person will not be overwhelmed by the amount of information that she overloads on PowerPoint slides. So if you happen to love physics, want to gain in-depth knowledge, or find enjoyment in learning, you will love her. Otherwise, I strongly recommend that you take Earth, Moon, Planet with Applegate. Amber Miller is very knowledgeable and takes her teaching job VERY seriously (possesses characteristics of a good professor,) although she is primarily a researcher. And she has a PhD/MA from Princeton(where I transferred from) and BA from Berkeley and specializes in cosmology, but surprisingly not pretentious at all. She clearly lacks affectation required of every Princetonian. Maybe too serious to be sociable...? I wish she learned how to be a poseuse rather than polishing her diva status. At the beginning of the term she warned us that this course would not proceed chapter by chapter through a textbook, and I though it should be fine. Boy, was I wrong on that assumption! Since we skipped many chapters,…

Very clear and interesting lectures. Prof. Miller didn't make any assumptions about prior knowledge and did her best to make sure every single person stayed with her. Homework much more difficult than lecture examples, but doable if you go to the help room or recitation sections. Difficult exams, but one is dropped and the curve is VERY generous.

Tries hard to make class interesting, but the course covers so much material at such a fast pace that she ends up just throwing up equations on the board which only make sense to you when she explains it. When you try to the do hw on your own you're pretty much completely lost since just knowing the equations doesn't help you at all. Nice, but not that great a teacher

24 lectures.11 homework assignments. 2 midterms. 1 final exam.

I like Amber Miller. She taught the material well, especially relativity. Every now and then she would stop and make sure everyone understood what was going on. She seemed very interested in making sure the students were learning and understanding the material. It was also helpful that she allowed a page of notes on the exams. I wish my Calculus teacher had done the same... (My only qualm is that it was sometimes hard to see her decimal points, which would confuse me at times.)

Contrary to other reviews, I really did not find Professor Miller to be as terrible as alleged. I am taking her this semester, and she teaches just like Professor Hailey from last term, with less experience, let's just say. The only difference, I would think, that lead to such contrasting reviews, is that Professor Hailey cut his students a LOT of slack, where i don't think Professor Miller has learned how. To those engineering students or people taking the class for the requirement, a word of advice: drop down to 1402, but for those who are seriously inclined to major in physics: stay in, you might learn something.