Arvind Narayanaswamy

Arvind is an awesome teacher! Note, I said teacher and not lecturer. His lectures sometimes seem disorganized especially in the first few weeks, but try never to lose him and you will be able to see why he organises his lectures the way he does. The first 30 minutes of his lecturers are extremely helpful- he recaps and gives hints for solving homework problems (sometimes he solves an entire homework question). If you can, always attend his office hours (4 hours each week). To me, his office hours were even better than the lectures in terms of understanding the course material. Please do yourself a huge favor and attend all the recitations that he hosts, if you can. If you cannot make them for whatever reason, get notes from others, look through the notes/ recording he provides, etc. Whatever happens, just make sure to know what was covered in recitations. All question on the midterm and finals are some variation of questions discussed in recitation. Concepts in this class can be challenging but his recitations help you get the important stuff you need and how to generally solve questions.

I should begin this review by saying that Arvind is clearly a brilliant researcher and very hard working man. However, I think there is a baseline level of organization and preparedness which is missing from Professor Narayanaswamy's class. The files and lecture slides he posts are very disorganized - they often repeat things, have material that was never covered in lectures or homework, and have file naming conventions that are very confusing. It makes it a struggle to even teach yourself the material after you're not able to follow the lectures. Arvind clearly knows the material by heart, and is very excited about it, and even makes a sincere attempt to teach you the real-world applications. That's nice and all, but alltogether the lectures are often unclear on what you'll actually need to take away or write down. The homeworks appear to be written by Arvind himself, which is a nice gesture, but it ends up causing a nightmare of corrections on problems that do not provide complete information or state what assumptions need to be made. On multiple occasions, corrections were made on the day before (once even the day) the assignment was due. You might learn to put it off until later in the week, like I did. The tests are very similar to the homework. I didn't think they were terribly unfair, but they were still sometimes unclear and many problems did not provide pictures or di…

Arvind is a cool professor. We can tell from the way he teaches, that he actually cares if the students understand the concepts or not. At the end of each concept, he tries to clear each and every doubt students have. It is a very Math intensive course. Had 7 or 8 assignments, final project and a final exam. Most of the assignments need Python. Prior experience with python would definitely help a lot. Final exam was easy and straight-forward. Project was hard and required lot of coding.

This course, as mentioned previously by another reviewer, is roughly divided into two parts. The first part is basically an introduction to his research area in thin films and radiative cooling. At the end of this section we were given a group project.The second part, is on thermal analysis of flat plate and parabolic rough collectors. Again, at the end, we were given a group project. Arvind is always ready to answer doubts during and after classes, but he does expect students to know certain concepts. I would strongly advice to go over basic engineering math and heat transfer for this class. ALL ASSIGNMENTS AND PROJECTS INVOLVE CODING. He recently moved from MATLAB to Python. Get to know at least the basics of Python before starting this course and you'll be able to pick up the language easily as the course progresses. All in all, I would recommend this course to anyone interested in solar thermal engineering and modeling of such systems

This course is really really hard. It kills the meche class. That being said, Arvind made the topic interesting and cared about the students. Many times I ran to his office hours and he would help through the topics, and give me the encouragement I needed. He can be a bit of a hard ass, and sometimes doesn't realize he is a lot smarter than most of his students, but he is fair for the most part.

It is a 6-level course. So the workload is huge accordingly.

The course is roughly split into two sections, one being the beginning spherical geometry part, the other being that of heat transfer, which is after the midterm. The materials for the first half will be tested through a relatively easy midterm utilizing the understanding rather than the derivation of the materials that he requires understanding, and the second half of the course will be tested through a final project, which features MATLAB coding, and will be the sole interest for Arvind. No final exam. What's worth mentioning about the course is the lack of management of the materials. The professor seems to be more interested in making things reasonable to himself than the rest of the class. He definitely requires interaction with students, but on rather weird occasions. If you'd took the heat transfer course of his before, it could be much easier, though. P.S. There were only two sets of homework, both involves derivation and MATLAB/Mathematica coding and will be graded by the grader together with the midterm. As these only appear at the beginning of the semester, make sure to contact the grader/TA if you've got a problem, since Arvind himself doesn't really that much welcome conditions that you obviously have no idea what he was talking about.

Best mechanical engineering professor in Columbia. Period. Cares about his students, and makes certain that no one is left behind in every lecture. He even told us one of the final exam's questions so we could work on it at home! It doesn't happen very often when intellect meets clarity, but all will experience those qualities in every lecture Prof. Narayanaswamy has to offer. I highly recommend Arvind! It pains me that he doesn't teach more classes-take and prioritize every class he has to teach!! His notes are also extremely well thought out. All of them are organized neatly and uploaded on Courseworks. Given his extraordinary organization and delivery, students have only themselves to blame if they do less than well in his class. I would not change a thing about him or his class.

Two group projects, two assignments. All using Python. Choose your group wisely.

Heat Transfer stood out as one of the more interesting classes the semester compared to the other MechE class I had because of the clear real-world applications it has. While thermodynamics was often very abstract, Arvind (everyone calls him by his first name) eagerly seeks actual situations where Heat Transfer is used. Though the class notes can sometimes be difficult to follow, most of the material is in the book, and the professor is usually willing to answer good questions. This is one class that I was able to engage in and occassionally even searched for relevant material outside of the required coursework. Assuming this is a required class for you, it's actually pretty interesting.