William Zajc

The other reviews are a travesty to some extent. Zajc is a great person and one that really wants to see you succeed--yes his lectures can be a little pointless but they're super helpful for the Psets! He's easily the kindest man I've come across faculty or otherwise. Fair grading scheme and a generous grade breakdown where HW is worth 50%.

Out of all the classes I took this semester, the grading structure for this class was the harshest. Your grade depends largely on two exams, the midterm and final. There are other components to the grade as well, but since grades are curved and everyone receives high grades on the homework and participation, they won't boost your grade that much. If you are confident enough that you have a good enough physics background to outscore your classmates on the midterm and final, take this class. The lectures are not helpful, so if you don't already know the material (like a large majority of the class), only take him if you can teach yourself the material. On the positive side, Professor Zajc is a nice guy otherwise!

Professor Zajc is a good professor, a great one compared to Physics instructors in general. He's better than usual at understanding a student's area of confusion, and is always patient and willing to explain things again and differently. His lectures are worthwhile: while they don't always demonstrate problem-solving techniques, they will explain the concepts you need to learn those techniques yourself. If you're not a Physics Person, you'll probably find this course a bit intense; if you are, then this is the course and professor for you.

Zajc is a legitimately nice guy and a brilliant physicist, but a sub-par lecturer at best. The lectures are entertaining for the wild and crazy rides he takes you on during them despite having little to do with course material ("You could just solve it by introspection, but we can prove it through a triple derivative! Let me show you exactly how!"). The lectures are otherwise fairly useless. If anything, go to Zajc's lectures to get a look at those ridiculous forearm muscles. A few homework problems can be legitimately challenging to nigh impossible; go to the recitation sessions to ask how to do them. They are a godsend. Test grading is based only off of the class mean and standard deviation, meaning if everyone does really well on one test (e.g. the first midterm), you won't do nearly as well on it as you would for a fairly mediocre score on a brutal test (e.g. the second midterm). You can drop one, but it's in your best interests to take both. In our case, a 100% on the first midterm was the equivalent of about a 50% on the second. The final is fair and comprehensive, be prepared for some substantial calculus usage though. Thankfully, the tests are open book (which doesn't help as much as it sounds) and the course grade is extremely generously curved (which definitely helps as much as it sounds). More than half of this class dropped to 1402 second semester, for what it's wo…

Zajc tries so hard that you feel badly if you don't reciprocate. You don't have to, as the class is easy enough, but you'll definitely feel like a bit of a heel when Zajc berates himself for not being a better teacher. His teaching style is organized conceptually if not physically on the blackboard. If you follow along, you'll notice that everything fits together very well in your notes. You'll learn the subject on a conceptual and computational level but you'll miss out on any deep theoretical issues. This is good or bad, depending on your perspective on physics. He's the nicest physics professor I've had here (and I've had 'em all...) and he's certainly not out to get you. Do the homework and come to his office hours a couple of times. He'll give you a good grade and he'll probably even remember your name afterwards.

Face it. E&M is an unbearable subject. Fortunately, Zajc is a decent prof, who, if he doesn't succeed entirely in communicating the material to you in lecture, nevertheless makes sure you get it through homeworks and exams. Homework sets range from moderate to impossible. I honeslty remember handing in sets with more than half the questions undone or incomplete. Exams are usually well-written, based very closely on the practice exams he distributes before hand. Master every aspect of the practice exam and you will own the real exam. This also applies to the final.

a physical understanding of linear algebra, dirac algebra.

Zajc is the nicest man you'll come across in Columbia--easily! It's a shame that he couldn't be with us throughout the semester but I'll say that lectures 100% map on HW and material can be learnt from the book directly (in fact better)!

Fun story -- today is June 19th. School ended more than a month ago. My 1602 grade was posted this morning. Apparently one of the TAs just walked off with most of the even-numbered homework assignments; after more than a month of frantically trying to contact him (her?) Zajc finally gave up and calculated our grades based on the remaining assignments. Of course, the "drop two" rule remained in effect, meaning that one could conceivably have stopped doing homework halfway through the semester and still gotten a perfect homework score. After the first semester we got used to long delays in grading, but I believe this is a new record.

Professor Zajc is an interesting person. His lectures are not particularly relevant to the problem sets that you have to complete since they are largely derivations of the concepts that you'll have to apply; however, they are quite amusing. Zajc' puns, peculiar vocabulary ("here we have the vectoriness of the velocity of this massy thingy"), and general behavior are really quite funny. Sometimes you do wonder, though, why he's derived the universal law of gravitation for a third time in two class periods. Otherwise, he's quite a nice guy. If you have any difficulty, go to recitation and get your questions answered - Ali Hanks does quite a good job as recitation instructor as well as "guest lecturer" when Zajc is traveling.