Elena Aprile

The course focuses on two labs that are done in halves of the semester. The issue is, however, Elena gives outdated or horribly vague lab manuals to operate complex equipment and is not helpful in elaborating when help is needed. Where the manuals lack, she offers incomplete lectures taught for an unrelated grad course. While the labs are interesting material, their presentation makes the awful.

Postbac Premed here. Unfortunately all the reviews I've read about this professor are accurate. Physics is hard and dense, especially with this particular text chosen for the class. Prof Aprile has confused deriving equations for teaching the logic behind the physics, often relying on our ability to integrate and substitute terms rather than helping us develop an understanding (or a stratety) of physics. Her lectures lend themselves to students who memorize facts (often loosely and without reason), not to students who want to learn the science. Because of this, application of the sicence to more involved problems which require a creative science mind are nearly impossilbe, and because of this, no real appreciation of the subject can be achieved. Additionally, she is more focused on how many chapters we get through rather than if we acutally learn something. Her lectures, therefore, are ill-prepared and often rushed--and because of this, she often writes incorrect formulas and often confuses terms, all the while complaining that we dont have enough time to finish anything. Her TA, in particular, Pontus, has been a great asset to her class, however, by attempting to answer the "why's" behind the calcuations. Other than that, I truly felt that I taught myself physics this semester, often poorly. I am impressed with Columbia's lack of interest in the quality of it's professors in…

Pretty much everything the last reviewer said is still true. She is nice, but she has said more than once she doesn't want to be there, she doesn't finish problems and spends forever deriving equations without showing you how to use them. To her credit, we do get out homework back in a timely manner (probably thanks to the TA), she puts up her lectures notes on courseworks (even though they aren't that helpful) and she does do little experiments in class sometimes that range anywhere from mildly entertaining to be scared for her safety. Also if you show improvement on the second midterm she will not count the first. If you are commuting any sort of distance to class, you are going to have a hard time making yourself show up, I promise.

The previous reviews for Aprile are unduly harsh. Yeah, she has a pretty thick Italian accent, but once you get used to it, its not terribly difficult to understand her. The biggest problem is when she is deriving formulas. She'll sometimes ski steps, and every now and then make a mistake when writing something out. But if you speak up and call her on it, she's always more than willing to correct a mistake or explain the steps she doesn't write down. As far as the difficulty of exams, she does tons of problems in class. If you understand those, and understand the problems on the sample exams she makes available, the midterms and final should be a piece of cake. Yeah, she's certainly not the best lecturer around, but I think you'll learn physics well enough, and if you do some homework and pay attention to class sometime, and above all, go over the sample exams, the grades will come easily enough.

I just can't like performing experiments and I hate that I'm forced to do them. 1 Columbia University: Arts & Sciences Fall 2022 Course: PHYSUN3081_003_2022_3-INTERMEDIATELABORATORYWORK : PHYSUN3081_003_2022_3 - INTERMEDIATE LABORATORY WORK Instructor: Morgan May

She is very bad at lecturing and the students are definitely not helping. The students ask her questions that slow down the whole process of learning for everyone else. If you take her class, you better suck it up and read the book because her lectures will not help you.

Elena Aprile is first and foremost a researcher. She comes in 5-10 minutes late every class, and it is blatantly obvious that she does not want to be there. She doesn't even do most examples completely, because she just starts you off and then tells you what you WOULD do and doesn't even give you the answers. I think she was doing the examples directly from the book and that's why she never told you answers, but still, she shouldn't expect us to just go to the book and search for those exact problems. Once, she even said in one example "So this is the penguin, no friction, blah blah blah, you plug in his mass and blah blah you get his acceleration." Didn't even solve the problem or set it up. And every now and then she says something like "I don't know why we do this, this is such bullshit" but when you get her started on her research of blackbody radiation, she gets SO happy and goes on for years. Probably a great researcher, but definitely not worthy of being a teacher.

Boring. I did not learn any physics for two semesters. Do not take her if you can take Kim instead. Kim substituted for her class once and was more organized and clear.

Work load is relatively light. probelm sets for each chapter every week of about 7 problems, 3-4 of which are randomly selected for grading. 2 mid terms. (She calculates a second curve based on everyone's dropped lowest score. You recieve the better of the two.) Exams are a little tough but very fair, only 4 questions each. Grading of them, however, can be EXTREEMLY strict. Take your time on them.

The only way I survived this class was by forcing myself to go to the lecture with my book, completely ignoring Aprile, and taking my own notes out of the book. Her lectures are basically straight from the book anyway. The TA holds a recitation the night before problem sets are due and does every problem for you, which is great until you get to the tests and realize you don't know how to do anything. Basically Aprile is brilliant with her research, but terrible when it comes to teaching.