ENAE441 | PlanetTerp

Information	Review
John Martin ENAE441 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/23/2024	I wish I could rate 4.5 stars, but planetterp doesn't let you. Anyway, there was a lot I liked about Dr. Martin and the way he ran the class. Apparently, this was the first semester with a "restructured" ENAE441 and it honestly went pretty smoothly. First off, Dr. Martin is an incredibly nice guy and is super knowledgeable and enthusiastic about this class and everything surrounding it. His lectures were some of the most interesting lectures I've been to. For a 9:30am class, there was not once where I felt like I was nodding off or bored. He really takes charge of the class and connects a lot of the material to things we may already be familiar with, including diagrams, examples, and answers to questions. Speaking of questions, he did not hesitate to answer them in class and often provided well-thought answers. If you thought of a question outside of class, he encouraged us to ask them in the discussion board on elms where anyone in the class could contribute and answer. Participation on the discussion board was also kept track of, providing those that were active on the board a couple extra credit points on exams. In terms of homework, to be completely honest, they were pretty hard and time consuming. The entire class is done through python due to Dr. Martin's (valid) belief that python is a valuable language to know in the real world. At first it can be a bit tedious to understand, but after a couple homeworks you get the hang of it. The homeworks often consisted of 3-4 long questions that required a lot of hard thinking to complete. However, these homeworks directly reflected the material taught in class and greatly helped with preparing for exams. I'm not sure what my grade would've been had these homeworks not been so thorough, but I have a feeling it would be lower than an A. Finally, Dr. Martin was pretty flexible to moving due dates for assignments. He was very understanding when it came to other classes having exams and big assignments on the same days and was very willing to accommodate us. The reason I am not giving a full 5 stars was more due to how the end of the semester was conducted. Before I say anything though, I think this was just a result of the new structure of this class and expect it to drastically improve in the coming semesters. The first thing that irked me was the timing of the second exam. We hadn't heard anything about it until about a week before it was scheduled, which happened to be the week before Thanksgiving break. Even though Dr. Martin gave us from Monday to Wednesday to start the exam, then an hour and fifteen to complete it, it felt extremely rushed and many felt that we could've at least heard about the exam much earlier. Then, he also assigned the last homework the same day he announced the second exam and made it due the Thursday after Thanksgiving break. Remember, these homeworks were very time consuming, and we also had three other classes that were assigning stuff to do the week after break. So, we were pretty much forced to start the homework over break unless we wanted to pull a few all nighters. Finally, instead of a final exam, we were given a final project. This was initially due a week after the last homework was due, which considering this is a final project, would be considerably more work than a typical homework. This on top of the fact that we only had a week to do it along with other final exams felt pretty unfair. Luckily, I think Dr. Martin realized this and decided to move the due date to the last day of finals. More on the final project, it was overall a really good culmination of everything we had learned, but there were a few HUGE typos that caused many people to spend a lot of time trying to debug in python on something that wasn't even their fault. Overall, I really loved Dr. Martin's class and generally how everything was run, but I thought that the end of the semester was way more stressful than it should've been. Again, I believe these are just products of a newly-structured class and will quickly get worked out, but it was just a bit frustrating to have to deal with. You really learn a lot from this class and I can confidently say that it was a valuable part of my education.
Lina Castano ENAE441 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 07/15/2024	I took her course in the summer in a 6 week session and she literally spent the entire first 2 weeks reviewing the material from the pre-req and when we got toward the end of the session she started going way over the scheduled class time (1 hour over for a 1:20 class) in order to cover everything. As if that wasn't enough, she didn't grade our midterm until a week after the final which is a bit of an issue when the midterm counts for 30% of your grade. Additionally, she kept on saying that she would give us numerical examples for algorithms so that we would be able to check our code against it and never actually gave us anything. Overall bad professor and the main reason I did well was because I was retaking the course and therefore already familiar with the material.
Liam Healy ENAE441 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 01/17/2024	If you don’t know how to teach yourself, you will not do well in this class. There are a lot of comments that the textbook is not well organized, and while that is partially true if you can use ctrl-f you can find anything that you really need. Homework’s are generally straightforward, however the exams are brutal. Expect to stay up at least two nights in advance writing matlab, as this course is extremely code-heavy and this will also be true of the exams as well. My best advice is to look over the matlab solutions for the homeworks and prepare general functions that can complete the types of problems in the hw, however be prepared to swap inputs/outputs, encounter edge cases on exams etc. If you are able to teach yourself from a textbook well lecture will be useless to you. Healy kinda just reads from the book with very little outside context or examples. He does however post his lectures which can be helpful with homeworks. Last piece of advice I’ll give is go on the steam website and purchase yourself kerbal space program. It was absolutely instrumental in solidifying a lot of the concepts from 404 as well as this course, at least for me.
Liam Healy ENAE441 Expecting a B- Anonymous 12/23/2023	The material in this class is genuinely not as hard as Controls but the class is equally as frustrating because of the horrible lecturing, brutal exam structure, and punishing grade distribution. Healy lectures by taking screenshots from the textbook and explains the material less cohesively than the textbook itself. This made it difficult to learn anything outside of doing the homework, all in MATLAB, while reading the book. If you have to take this class STUDY FOR THE EXAMS even though they are open note. They were 25% of the final grade each, with only a few questions, so a single mistake or two on a question can lose you 5-10% of your TOTAL GRADE. The project was also a confusing mess where we had to redo our work multiple times because we weren’t sure what he wanted from us, in the end everyone got a similar mediocre score from 80-90. Genuinely my least enjoyable class I have time in my time at UMD. I cant believe I passed, I got lucky with what I studied ending up on the exam.
Liam Healy ENAE441 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/23/2021	This class had the lowest in-person and total attendance I have ever seen. I believe this is because Dr. Healy was not an effective teacher. The way to succeed in this course is to write out MATLAB code before each exam based on what you believe might be on it. Because the grading on exams is sometimes quite brutal, you must make sure you do not make errors. The exams are not a measure of your intelligence but rather a measure of how well you can navigate through the book and how much code you wrote before the exam. For example, if you believe there may be a trilateration question on an exam, write out working trilateration code before the exam. Make sure to have the textbook open for the whole exam and get ready to hit ctrl+f quite a bit as you search for specific equations in the book. The homeworks are of a large range of difficulty with some of them being a breeze and others being close to impossible. The range of time I personally spent on completing them were between 1 hour and 14 hours. The MATLAB "application" called SNAG-app that Dr. Healy made is very difficult to use and has servers that sometimes go down. The final project in the class has a MATLAB code portion that took me 25 minutes to run each time which wouldn't be an issue if his app didn't keep timing out and causing errors halfway through running. I have never considered a course to be painful until now, but this course was that for me. Not very hard but extremely brutal and unforgiving.
Liam Healy ENAE441 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 06/10/2020	Dr. Healy is one of those professors who I think splits their time between being a professor here and working at a different location for research/testing. He therefore, albeit very responsive to emails and was very reasonable with me to his credit, seems to be less focused on teaching, which comes across as he simply writes main points from his textbook on the chalkboard as his lecture style. Homeworks in this class are typically deviously simple, where you will absolutely trip up is on the midterm. No amount of studying helped me significantly with that midterm and it really caused quite a stir in our class once grades were released. He isn't the best professor in terms of conveying the material in his book, and often times the concepts that were pretty well defined in 404 become a lot more confusing. This is especially true for HCW relative motion maneuvers (not the state definitions, calculating delta-v here is not in his textbook and the method he presents will only become clear to you once you do it a few times) and once you get to probability and Kalman filters and least squares it gets kinda wild. All things considered though, the class content is interesting, and if you're one of the people who completely bombs the midterm outright there is a slight chance you will have the opportunity to take the much more lenient and simplified version taught by Dr. Marcus
Liam Healy ENAE441 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 11/12/2018	Not a good professor. Just reads from his book, which is not very well organized. You spend a lot of time re-learning material from ENAE404 in ways that are a lot less clear. Exams are open book but unfair and include material not covered in class, in the book, or in homework.
Liam Healy ENAE441 Expecting an A- Anonymous 06/27/2012	Not a great professor. He doesn't really teach and his exams can cover any number of topics that you probably didn't study because he did not go over it in class. Good luck. Less of a review of Healy: Take the aero track because you will avoid Akin. If you want to do space in your career going aero will still be the better choice.

John Martin
ENAE441

Expecting an A
Anonymous
12/23/2024

I wish I could rate 4.5 stars, but planetterp doesn't let you. Anyway, there was a lot I liked about Dr. Martin and the way he ran the class. Apparently, this was the first semester with a "restructured" ENAE441 and it honestly went pretty smoothly. First off, Dr. Martin is an incredibly nice guy and is super knowledgeable and enthusiastic about this class and everything surrounding it. His lectures were some of the most interesting lectures I've been to. For a 9:30am class, there was not once where I felt like I was nodding off or bored. He really takes charge of the class and connects a lot of the material to things we may already be familiar with, including diagrams, examples, and answers to questions. Speaking of questions, he did not hesitate to answer them in class and often provided well-thought answers. If you thought of a question outside of class, he encouraged us to ask them in the discussion board on elms where anyone in the class could contribute and answer. Participation on the discussion board was also kept track of, providing those that were active on the board a couple extra credit points on exams. In terms of homework, to be completely honest, they were pretty hard and time consuming. The entire class is done through python due to Dr. Martin's (valid) belief that python is a valuable language to know in the real world. At first it can be a bit tedious to understand, but after a couple homeworks you get the hang of it. The homeworks often consisted of 3-4 long questions that required a lot of hard thinking to complete. However, these homeworks directly reflected the material taught in class and greatly helped with preparing for exams. I'm not sure what my grade would've been had these homeworks not been so thorough, but I have a feeling it would be lower than an A. Finally, Dr. Martin was pretty flexible to moving due dates for assignments. He was very understanding when it came to other classes having exams and big assignments on the same days and was very willing to accommodate us. The reason I am not giving a full 5 stars was more due to how the end of the semester was conducted. Before I say anything though, I think this was just a result of the new structure of this class and expect it to drastically improve in the coming semesters. The first thing that irked me was the timing of the second exam. We hadn't heard anything about it until about a week before it was scheduled, which happened to be the week before Thanksgiving break. Even though Dr. Martin gave us from Monday to Wednesday to start the exam, then an hour and fifteen to complete it, it felt extremely rushed and many felt that we could've at least heard about the exam much earlier. Then, he also assigned the last homework the same day he announced the second exam and made it due the Thursday after Thanksgiving break. Remember, these homeworks were very time consuming, and we also had three other classes that were assigning stuff to do the week after break. So, we were pretty much forced to start the homework over break unless we wanted to pull a few all nighters. Finally, instead of a final exam, we were given a final project. This was initially due a week after the last homework was due, which considering this is a final project, would be considerably more work than a typical homework. This on top of the fact that we only had a week to do it along with other final exams felt pretty unfair. Luckily, I think Dr. Martin realized this and decided to move the due date to the last day of finals. More on the final project, it was overall a really good culmination of everything we had learned, but there were a few HUGE typos that caused many people to spend a lot of time trying to debug in python on something that wasn't even their fault. Overall, I really loved Dr. Martin's class and generally how everything was run, but I thought that the end of the semester was way more stressful than it should've been. Again, I believe these are just products of a newly-structured class and will quickly get worked out, but it was just a bit frustrating to have to deal with. You really learn a lot from this class and I can confidently say that it was a valuable part of my education.

Lina Castano
ENAE441

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
07/15/2024

I took her course in the summer in a 6 week session and she literally spent the entire first 2 weeks reviewing the material from the pre-req and when we got toward the end of the session she started going way over the scheduled class time (1 hour over for a 1:20 class) in order to cover everything. As if that wasn't enough, she didn't grade our midterm until a week after the final which is a bit of an issue when the midterm counts for 30% of your grade. Additionally, she kept on saying that she would give us numerical examples for algorithms so that we would be able to check our code against it and never actually gave us anything. Overall bad professor and the main reason I did well was because I was retaking the course and therefore already familiar with the material.

Liam Healy
ENAE441

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
01/17/2024

If you don’t know how to teach yourself, you will not do well in this class. There are a lot of comments that the textbook is not well organized, and while that is partially true if you can use ctrl-f you can find anything that you really need. Homework’s are generally straightforward, however the exams are brutal. Expect to stay up at least two nights in advance writing matlab, as this course is extremely code-heavy and this will also be true of the exams as well. My best advice is to look over the matlab solutions for the homeworks and prepare general functions that can complete the types of problems in the hw, however be prepared to swap inputs/outputs, encounter edge cases on exams etc. If you are able to teach yourself from a textbook well lecture will be useless to you. Healy kinda just reads from the book with very little outside context or examples. He does however post his lectures which can be helpful with homeworks. Last piece of advice I’ll give is go on the steam website and purchase yourself kerbal space program. It was absolutely instrumental in solidifying a lot of the concepts from 404 as well as this course, at least for me.

Liam Healy
ENAE441

Expecting a B-
Anonymous
12/23/2023

The material in this class is genuinely not as hard as Controls but the class is equally as frustrating because of the horrible lecturing, brutal exam structure, and punishing grade distribution. Healy lectures by taking screenshots from the textbook and explains the material less cohesively than the textbook itself. This made it difficult to learn anything outside of doing the homework, all in MATLAB, while reading the book. If you have to take this class STUDY FOR THE EXAMS even though they are open note. They were 25% of the final grade each, with only a few questions, so a single mistake or two on a question can lose you 5-10% of your TOTAL GRADE. The project was also a confusing mess where we had to redo our work multiple times because we weren’t sure what he wanted from us, in the end everyone got a similar mediocre score from 80-90. Genuinely my least enjoyable class I have time in my time at UMD. I cant believe I passed, I got lucky with what I studied ending up on the exam.

Liam Healy
ENAE441

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
12/23/2021

This class had the lowest in-person and total attendance I have ever seen. I believe this is because Dr. Healy was not an effective teacher. The way to succeed in this course is to write out MATLAB code before each exam based on what you believe might be on it. Because the grading on exams is sometimes quite brutal, you must make sure you do not make errors. The exams are not a measure of your intelligence but rather a measure of how well you can navigate through the book and how much code you wrote before the exam. For example, if you believe there may be a trilateration question on an exam, write out working trilateration code before the exam. Make sure to have the textbook open for the whole exam and get ready to hit ctrl+f quite a bit as you search for specific equations in the book. The homeworks are of a large range of difficulty with some of them being a breeze and others being close to impossible. The range of time I personally spent on completing them were between 1 hour and 14 hours. The MATLAB "application" called SNAG-app that Dr. Healy made is very difficult to use and has servers that sometimes go down. The final project in the class has a MATLAB code portion that took me 25 minutes to run each time which wouldn't be an issue if his app didn't keep timing out and causing errors halfway through running. I have never considered a course to be painful until now, but this course was that for me. Not very hard but extremely brutal and unforgiving.

Liam Healy
ENAE441

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
06/10/2020

Dr. Healy is one of those professors who I think splits their time between being a professor here and working at a different location for research/testing. He therefore, albeit very responsive to emails and was very reasonable with me to his credit, seems to be less focused on teaching, which comes across as he simply writes main points from his textbook on the chalkboard as his lecture style. Homeworks in this class are typically deviously simple, where you will absolutely trip up is on the midterm. No amount of studying helped me significantly with that midterm and it really caused quite a stir in our class once grades were released. He isn't the best professor in terms of conveying the material in his book, and often times the concepts that were pretty well defined in 404 become a lot more confusing. This is especially true for HCW relative motion maneuvers (not the state definitions, calculating delta-v here is not in his textbook and the method he presents will only become clear to you once you do it a few times) and once you get to probability and Kalman filters and least squares it gets kinda wild. All things considered though, the class content is interesting, and if you're one of the people who completely bombs the midterm outright there is a slight chance you will have the opportunity to take the much more lenient and simplified version taught by Dr. Marcus

Liam Healy
ENAE441

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
11/12/2018

Not a good professor. Just reads from his book, which is not very well organized. You spend a lot of time re-learning material from ENAE404 in ways that are a lot less clear. Exams are open book but unfair and include material not covered in class, in the book, or in homework.

Liam Healy
ENAE441

Expecting an A-
Anonymous
06/27/2012

Not a great professor. He doesn't really teach and his exams can cover any number of topics that you probably didn't study because he did not go over it in class. Good luck. Less of a review of Healy: Take the aero track because you will avoid Akin. If you want to do space in your career going aero will still be the better choice.

Reviews for ENAE441