Tommaso Botta

Midterm, Final, and Project. Final and midterm were worth like 80% of your grade total.

I hate to leave a negative review because he is a really nice guy, but he just was not very good at explaining the concepts. I think he just was not very interested in the material, and therefore just didn't put much effort into teaching.

One pset per week–do the extra credit problems!–and a final project. Very difficult midterm and final (avg was barely above 60%). Course was curved very generously as a result.

Dr. Botta is a solid lecturer and makes himself accessible to his students. He is generally organized but will occasionally slip up. I expected this class to be challenging–which it definitely was–but was pleasantly surprised by how much the course's curve boosted my final grade. As the title suggests, a good blend between LA and probability theory (close to 50/50). I took this class to fulfill the quantitative reasoning requirement for my major (Sustainable Development) and was glad I took it instead of a less mathematically diverse class such as stats. Not the most exciting course, but you'll learn a lot.

There were 12 homework assignments (the best 10 being used for grading), a midterm, a final, and a project. The homework often took me a while to complete. The project was my favorite part of the course as it taught basic research skills and shows how the topics covered in class show up outside of the classroom and in CS. The course was curved at the end to a B/B+.

Botta is incredibly helpful and genuinely cares about students. He puts a lot of effort into his office hours and his grading standards are generous. He even very kindly agreed to write me a rec letter despite not being a top student in the class (I did about average). In my opinion, the class could have been less theoretical. I would have liked to see in-class example problems similar to the homework problems (as opposed to having the homework problems feel brand new). I personally found the course to be fast-paced and on the more difficult side, but I know some others found it easier than I did. While I did appreciate Botta’s educational philosophy that challenge leads to growth and that you don’t need to do everything perfectly when learning, I felt that the class could have been structured a little better to execute this. I believe this was Botta’s first time teaching at Columbia and think that with revision and practice this course and his teaching have a lot of potential.

12 psets, probably 4-5 hrs each 2 ridiculously hard exams that he wasn't clear about grading until after the semester and said they would be curved.

I am going to echo other's sentiments on this professor. Very nice and approachable, however does not know how to properly communicate with students about the materials or the course itself. He would introduce a subject, and immediately delve in to proofs and theorems about the subject and stay exclusively in the abstract. I could count on one hand the number of times that he went and actually did an example of problems we were expected to do for psets or exams in class. This resulted in the workload being much greater as basically each pset required a deep dive in the textbook or youtube tutorials to actually understand how to do the given problems, as we had no examples in class. The amount of times that he was corrected on the board was concerning, especially given how confused the majority of the class already was, so who knows how many mistakes went uncorrected. It is clear that Botta is very smart, however I think there might be a genuine lack of understanding of how undergrads learn and understand material and how to convey that to them effectively. I knew of more than a few students who simply stopped attending lectures because it was potentially more confusing to them to get a convoluted lecture about the subject vs just reading the book/watching YT tutorials. The most ridiculous aspect of the class was the project, where we were given a project draft date and then re…

The weekly workload is reasonable, with assignments taking about 6 hours per week to complete thoroughly.

Professor Botta is really nice and easy to talk to. His lectures are well-organized, though sometimes it feels like he's going through a list of topics rather than walking us through how they connect. The good thing is he's totally fine with you asking questions anytime. Definitely go to his office hours—not many people do, and he puts in real effort to make things click for you.