Paul Olsen

Professor Olsen is a fascinating lecturer and an even more fascinating man. Coming into this class, I was extremely excited to learn about dinosaurs, as someone who loves Jurassic Park and the works. However, much to my surprise, the class was about so much more than dinosaurs. In this class, you cover Earth history from the Big Bang until the rise of mammals, all done with engaging and thought-out lectures that Professor Olsen spends hours on; you can tell his dedication by each cited source and personal drawing he adds. While some people are complaining about the class and the workload, they (most likely) took the class thinking it would be an easy A, which it can be IF you are dedicated and don't slack off. As someone who took the lab component as well, this class was a foundational experience at Columbia, as it taught me the breadth of what I can learn and accomplish here. I never thought I would be sketching fossils at the Natural History Museum and actually understand the work I was doing and the intricate world of the Mesozoic Era, but Professor Olsen made it happen. Some of the reviews have painted Professor Olsen to be a disinterested, unengaging professor, but this is far from the case. Professor Olsen is extremely well-versed in this field (and his stories about his experiences are genuinely entertaining and sometimes a little crazy), so this adds to the immersive a…

Whew. Professor Olsen is certainly passionate about his field, but he reminded me that passion about a topic doesn't always translate to an ability to communicate that passion. I found that he was somehow going too slowly and too quickly through his lectures at the same time, to the point where I didn't know what was important to remember and found his train of thought difficult to follow. As an environmental science major this was a required class for me, but I wouldn't recommend taking it unless it's a requirement. Dr. Palmer was much easier to learn from for me and Dr. Dyrhman is quirky and passionate but better at explaining things than Dr. Olsen.

Very organized lectures, but glossy and short on actual material. Most of his exam is a straight-up memorization of the geologic timescale. Olsen's labs are particularly tortuous as they involve many-hours-long individual fieldtrips to places like the aquarium and AMNH to draw numerous fish, and dino bones, (and ALL the flowers, trees, and plants at the botanical gardens)

My expectations going into this class was to learn more about dinosaurs. As someone taking this class for a requirement, DO NOT. Unfortunately, I left this class overall confused about what the main point of the class was. The professor is completely unorganized, there is no clear syllabus, and the lab requires an extensive amount of time and extra research. Though professor Olsen is very knowledgeable and passionate about this field, he is not the best lecturer. It is extremely unclear what the connection is between lectures and there is very little overlap between the information learned in lecture and the lab. In addition, many of the lab reports require a two hour visit to the AMNH which you do have to pay for (they only started providing free tickets half-way through the semester). It is important to note that the professor plans on changing the syllabus to exams and will now be taking attendance. I would avoid taking this class at ALL COSTS.

Out of all the Life Systems professors, I would have to say Professor Olsen is my least favorite. I will say that he is obviously very passionate about his lecture topics and knowledgeable. However, this dude zooms through the lecture slides so fast. I literally kept feeling like I had missed a class that I was supposed to take before this in order to understand what he was talking about (especially when he was talking about archaebacteria and just everything about the origin of life on Earth basically). This dude puts 4 slides onto one page so overall, I think we went through like 800 slides (granted that some of them were like table of contents but still that was so much to zoom through). I talked to a lot of other students, and they felt the same way about this. Another thing, his exam was by far so much harder than Professor Palmer's. The wording on the exam was extremely confusing and the answer choices were unclear. It felt like he was questioning us on things that we had never learned before our only briefly talked about. I think the average for the exam was 64 in my lab section compared to the 86 on Professor Palmer's exam. All the professors do record their lectures though so you can get away with not going to class all the time. However, Professor Olsen does pace around a lot during class so his audio gets super wonky for the recordings (beware of that if you're plan…

This course is honestly so hard. The course description of the class said that it should be easy and accessible for students with all kinds of backgrounds and interests in science. In my experience, this is not necessarily the case. Due to the niche topic of the course, it feels as if you're always playing catch-up and starting from the basics.

This class is not incredibly difficult. The content is pretty simple. However, damn is it a lot of busy work. The labs are demonic. I suppose all labs are, but these are pretty annoying.

Paul is great and funny but the class is not very well organized. It's very difficult to follow the progression of things which is very important to the class since Paul and the text book skip around times and classifications frequently. Also, there's so much information its nearly impossible to parse out what is important and what's not and Paul doesn't make that delineation any easier. It's also almost impossible to take notes during the class since he speaks really quickly and there's no information on the slides. He does post his lectures online later some of them with narration which is helpful for studying for the final when you finally know what you need to know.

The second semester of Enviro Bio was so so so different from the first, they should hardly be considered part of the same sequence. I, too, enjoyed this semester more, but mostly because the I preferred the material and the laid-back character of the professors. Matt Palmer is awesome (too bad he's married now, though!) and he does a really great job breaking material down so that students can understand both the details and the big picture. He very intelligent, and therefore can move through material very quickly, but slows down for in-class questions. Paul Olsen is very old. I found his lectures incredibly random and disorganized. I would often look up from 15 minutes of gchatting to see a massive purple and pink "dinosaur recreation" on the screen, listened for a few minutes to see if what he was talking about was at all related to the image, discovered it wasn't and then returned to my online dalliances. This said, I understand that Olsen knows his stuff about dinos and rocks, but the technology (ie PowerPoint and iClickers) really seemed to get the better of him. Kevin Griffin is also a very smart dude. He tends to do more "big picture" stuff and assumes that his students can get the details elsewhere. His research is pretty interesting and his kids are really cute (they make it into about every other lecture). Shaena is the shit. Again, super smart but also cool and ver…

I had a completely different experience from the person below me.... If you're looking for an easy class or expect to spend your time sitting around talking about 'Land Before Time' then this class is NOT for you. I know a lot of my classmates took this class expecting an easy A, but this is not a "rocks for jocks" class. Professor Olsen is EXTREMELY knowledgable about all things dinosaur related, but he also incorporates general principles of evolution and climate change into his lectures. His lectures did tend to be a bit "dense" and 80% of the material he discusses in class was not on the final or useful in writing the term paper. However, he ALWAYS tells you what is going to be on the final and even discusses what aspects of each lecture might make a good term paper topic. With that in mind I completely disagree with the reviewer below me. If you can't think of a topic for a term paper in this class then you're just not paying attention or weren't showing up to his lectures. I got an A+ on my term paper and didn't have to do rewrites...'Professor Olsen also gives you a giant list of possible topics. If you can't thin of one just choose one (there's literally over 30 given to you). I chose to take this class along with the lab and I highly suggest to do the same. The labs are run by the TA's and correlate with the lectures. I learned more in depth information from the labs…