Sharmila Kamat

worst teacher of my life let alone my college career! never taught anything right, never knew any of the materials, and wasn't fair on the grading! terrible terrible teacher. run far far away even if it means a 6PM section for frontiers discussion.

I had enough bad luck to have her as a instructor during fall 2007, but was astonished to see that she's been teaching for at least two years - i thought mine was the first class she'd ever taught. she's Incredibly unprepared, in terms of knowledge of the material - she knew even less than the students who actually did the reading. First semester would have been a perfect experience, had I not taken this agonizingly boring, permanently awkward seminar. While the ridiculous FoS lectures could become bearable and perhaps even interesting from time to time, the obligatory seminar with Sharmila has make it hard for me to forgive the inventors of FoS

A very nice woman who is very available after class and for extra help. She knows astronomy very well and makes an effort to answer all lecture questions, if she doesn't know the answer she asks another expert. She is very responsive over email.

Well-intentioned, hard-working professor. Knows a lot about astrophysics and the astronomy unit. Discussion section is generally powerpoints and worksheets. Weekly homeworks (relatively easy) accompanied by tedious readings (unnecessary). You can get by without reading Habits of Mind if you know some statistics stuff, standard error, probability etc.

Sharmila's pedagogical incompetence warrants a court injunction against her appearing in front of a classroom ever again. A typical seminar goes as follows: she, a short, quiet Indian woman with a thick and obfuscatory accent, lectures for a few minutes. When she sees the class getting discouraged, she berates herself for her inability to energize the class (either internally, or once externally), causing a downward spiral of depression for everyone in the room, as there are still roughly 100 minutes left in seminar. Worksheets, asking questions more fit for a fifth-grader in special ed (or an athlete), are disseminated and disposed of in a few minutes, except for in groups comprised of athletes or perfectionist pedants, where they are drawn out over absurd spans of time. Sharmila makes the rounds of the cramped, windowless room, upbraiding students for their idleness, not realizing that they have finished her infuriatingly simplistic worksheets ten minutes ago. Another worksheet is given and finished in short order, and the process is repeated ad nauseam, or at least until the short break. More excruciating lecturing and pedantic self-indulgence follows, and the clock crawls to salvation, what seems like five hours after it all started. Not all of the blame should be placed upon Sharmila's shoulders for my horrific experience, though. Frontiers is the kind of pseudo-intellect…

I took her class Fall 2006. After reading some of the reviews on here, I think that she has been working to improve her technique. After all, it's not as if she teaches anything besides this class. I thought she did a good job explaining the lecture material. The only times that I had problems was because of the lectures themselves or my own laziness. Seminars often involved doing handouts in class in small groups. I wasn't a big fan of these, but they helped because they were somewhat similar to practice questions for the midterm/final. Sometimes we were able to decide what to do in class. This was very helpful because some lectures needed an extra review and some didn't. I think that she makes the material easy to understand, but I also have a propensity towards science.

Kamat is a nice person, I think, but she lacks anything that even resembles a teaching method. She paces around the class talking non-stop about some abstract scientific concept that will never surface on any assignments or tests, occasionally chiding us for not speaking more. Sometimes, people do make an effort to get in a word edgewise, but they're always met with Kamat's confusion. She was completely blown away by some of the simplest, most basic questions (Is the final cumulative?) and, like other reviewers said, would then proceed to challenge us to answer the questions ourselves. I don't think she took attendance, but I was so terrified at the prospect of having to retake Frontiers that I didn't risk skipping the pointless seminars.

Good God. What can be said about Sharmila Kamat, other than "AHHHH!" She is a nice, kind person. However, you will learn absolutely nothing in her section. She could RARELY answer any of the questions put forth by our class, and frankly seemed rather intimidated while trying to come up with a response. Whenever she could not answer a question herself (which was about 90 percent of the time) she simply turned it on the class, and we stared back in wide wonder. Here is a scenario taken directly from my fourth discussion section with Sharmila: The entire class was really confused about sunspot magnetism. We kept asking questions about the concept, which she was utterly incapable of clarifying. Finally, after much commotion, she said, direct quote: "I can tell we are all really confused about this. I think we should just move on." (Stunned silence in the room, angst and tears on students' faces.) This is not a joke.

Sharmila was the worst part of my first semester. Not only does she know absolutely NOTHING about the coursework, she is clearly very uncomfortable in front of a class and would rather be anywhere else. She made everyone feel awkward all the time and she was rude. I could not WAIT to get out of her class. Class time consisted of reading rediculously unrelated scienctific journal articles (which she liked to make about four copies of, total, for the whole class) and worksheets that were basically the same as the homework, which was a rediculous waste of time in itself. In general, Frontiers of Science is the most atrocious class I've sat through in my life, and was terribly run. If you get Sharmila, though, TRY and get out.

Frontiers was an awful class... but it's not the fault of Professor Kamat. She definitely will try to help you if you seek her out. She was always willing to answer my questions when I went to her office hours, even though I often felt dumb because I struggle with math concepts. Sometimes she was difficult to understand and sometimes she didn't always understand what the students would say in class, but she is clearly intelligent and she would go over the problems at her office hours with me until I understood them. She also responds quickly to questions via email. The curriculum for the class is not especially interesting to non-science majors and the homework assignments were usually difficult (in my opinion) and didn't pertain to what was taught in the lecture. But none of this can be blamed on Kamat since she has no control over the curriculum. She's friendly and approachable--make an effort and show you care by asking for help when you need it and ye shall receive it.