Natasa Sesum

Professor Sesum is Serbian so her pronunciation of certain mathematical terms may not be what you're used to but that doesn't get in the way of her doing a clear and efficient job in explaining the material. She pretty much follows the book so it is quite possible to read the book in place of going to class. However, she frequently uses problems she solves in class on her midterms so at least go to class the day before the midterm which is usually a review session.

I took Sesum in the Fall and I found her to be the best math professor I have had at Columbia. Her accept is not strong although she does speak softly if you're sitting in the back. That doesn't matter, though, because she clearly writes out each step and figure on the board for you to copy down so my notes were fantastic. I pretty much just studied my notes when reviewing for tests and homework although the book does a fair job of showing some examples when doing the problem sets. The sets themselves are not that hard and I usually finished them in less than 2 hours. The midterm and final were more than fair as they covered the key concepts only. I feel I have a strong grasp of Calc III. Overall good course and good professor.

This class was super easy, but only because she's a great professor. She puts great notes on the board - clear and concise. She's also really nice and helpful if you decided to go to her office hours.

Though Sesum is a perfectly nice person, I honestly think her teaching boarders on awful. I took Calculus in high school, and so in the beginning of the class, when we were covering material I was already familiar with, things were fine. However, when it came to teaching new material, the class took a serious nose dive. Our entire class did poorly on the second midterm, but in her defense, she does curve the exam grades. She moves too quickly when she is trying to explain things, and tries to cover too much in one class period. Often the examples she did in class were so different from the homework problems that they didn't really help. If you ask her a question, she will do her best to answer it, but she doesn't generally ask for questions so you have to be really forceful about asking. Her office hours were at 7 pm which was really inconvenient for most people, and there were always a lot of people there, so someitmes it was much too difficult to get individual attention. However, if you do make an effort to go to office hours every week and get to know her, she can be very helpful. But it shouldn't require that much extra effort to get a teacher to help you. The exams were always much more difficult than any of us expected them to be, or than she led us to believe they would be. The course description says that this class is meant for people who have never taken Calc before…

One eight-question homework assignment each week, two non-cumulative midterms and one cumulative final exam.

Professor Sesum was truly excellent. In fact, reading some of these negative comments about her actually pisses me off. Taking Calc IV now, I appreciate her even more, because I see that all the things she stressed, including a few of the proofs we were encouraged to learn, were really important. This was simply a no bullshit class. She covered a lot of material, and her tests were definitely challenging, but then she didn't go out of her way to throw all kinds of curveballs at you.

Natasa is very fair, very smart, and very nice. When it comes to her teaching ability, however, she is mediocre at best. She is, however, very approachable and wants to give you a good grade.

Great prof., she speaks quietly, but if you sit close enough that shouldn't be a problem. She explains things very systematically: she'll write out all of the steps and if she skips some and you don't understand she will go back and elaborate, and, like the other reviewer said, she doesn't waste your time with useless proofs. I had to take this class as a prereq for an econ course and I really hate math, but I found it quite painless

Professor Sesum is a nice person, but not the greatest teacher. When explaining a problem she tends to list the steps, but never explain WHY you should take them. A typical explaination will sound like 'and then this happens and then this happens and then this happens and we get the answer". She tends to wisper into the board in a medium accent, and it is hard to read what she writes on the board. In brief, I recommend trying to find another calc professor.

So here's the thing, Prof Sesum is a nice person and she's very smart. The problem is that she works way too quickly. When you ask her to slow down, she will but even that is too fast. The class is still copying down example 1 while she's almost done with example 2. She just tends to skip writing down little steps which isn't a big deal if you've been doing this for a long time but for someone who isn't a math major but just likes calculus and likes writing down all the little steps, this can get confusing. Overall, you really need to know your stuff to sit through her class and keep up with what she's doing.