Reviews for ENAE484

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David Akin ENAE484 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/10/2023	Dr. Akin is a wonderfully smart person and can absolutely come across as tough, however if you actually talk to him he will help you tremendously. PDR and CDR's are still tough but apparently much nicer than pre-covid, just make sure you know the stuff you are presenting. Don't be afraid to ask Akin questions because I promise he wants to help you out and would rather talk to you before you embarrass yourself in CDR/PDR.
David Akin ENAE484 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/10/2023	Final semester, first review. The reviews of Dr. Akin are wrong in many ways. To start, his 483 lectures are interesting and thought provoking. I always walked out of class wanting to learn more. Dr. Akins encompassing knowledge of all things space is seriously impressive, ask him about almost anything from doing a Lunar link budget to when the next SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch is and I assure you he will know. However, more importantly I wanted to say that the reviews about his character and attitude couldn't be more incorrect. Dr. Akin is genuinely kind and very passionate, your work may never get graded, but I think most people will enjoy 483/484 a lot more than these reviews make you think. 484 comes down to what you put in, and maybe a little about how cool your group is.
David Akin ENAE484 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/02/2023	Dr. Akin can be difficult to deal with at times, but he does not deserve such a low rating. He is a nice guy and is incredibly knowledgeable about aerospace engineering. If you do your work you will get an A (even if you don't end up getting any of your assignments graded).
David Akin ENAE484 Expecting an A Anonymous 07/06/2022	I had to let this class sit with me for a little after I graduated because after I was done I honestly could not find the words to describe how awful he is. Akin is quite possibly the worst professor in the Aerospace department and I say that having also taken classes with Winkelmann. Akin would be incapable of even accidentally teaching you something. “This is what it’s like in the real world.” OK. I work at NASA now. None of my superiors or coworkers have ever berated me for design ideas or completely missed due dates by months, or go off to the side and snicker with their other senior engineers about how inexperienced the new hires are. A manchild with a power complex and ego so huge that he can’t ever recognize his own faults and takes it out on his students.
David Akin ENAE484 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/17/2021	I cannot even begin to describe how terrible of a professor he is. Doesn’t teach, is condescending, never grades anything in a timely manner, spends lectures talking about stories of his previous projects but never actually gives you anything of substance - essentially you’re on your own in an uphill battle in this class because you’re for sure not going to learn anything from him.
David Akin ENAE484 Expecting an A Anonymous 06/09/2020	As much as I despise air track for not only their boring subject matter but for sort of making the degree a joke with how easy their classes are, if I had to do it all again I would 1000x over choose air track just so I could avoid having to take a class with Dr. Akin. I have never met a professor - scratch that, ANYONE - so deluded in their own ways that they believe hating literally everything you do in this class constitutes actual teaching and guidance. Let’s say you have to design a thruster (because you can’t just use what already exists like the rest of the world). You think to yourself “hey, I remember learning something about this in the 483 slides, I’ll just use information from that, it came directly from Dr. Akin so it must be what he wants.” And so you go on with it, present your findings in the Design Review, and he says every bit of information you used is inaccurate and wrong and the analysis is faulty and you shouldn’t use info from his slides why would you even consider doing that. So, OK, no problem it was just PDR you’ll surely fix it by CDR, just take his information out, find new sources, redo all the work for that, good to go yeah? Wrong. Didn’t you know you covered the same concepts back in 483?? There were literally slides you could’ve pulled information from! Why would you not use the 483 slides when they were made accessible specifically for you to use in this class, it’s like you’ve just ignored a whole semester worth of teaching, how could you, how heinous, that deserves a 4/10 for technical content should’ve known better. Don’t even get me started on how he doesn’t even look at the assignments he gives in 483 let alone grade them with any feedback, effectively wasting your entire semester that you could have used to plan for the RASC-AL competition, that he complains about how hard it is for UMD to gain entry into every year, instead of waiting until you only have a literal month to design an entire system. I honestly hope, for the future of the Space Track curriculum, he gets phased out with someone who can actually give constructive guidance. To anyone entering 484, I wish you the best.
David Akin ENAE484 Anonymous 05/25/2012	What are my comments on this class? If I knew how this semester was going to turn out, I would have taken air track just to avoid this one class and my least favorite subject is aerodynamics. Akin keeps telling us 'this is what it'll be like in the real world' and because of that, has convinced me to avoid industry at all costs. I wholeheartedly and absolutely refuse to touch any space systems topic in the future because I never want to deal with anything or anyone like Dr. Akin ever again. The expectations and workload for this class were beyond what is reasonable for a 3 credit course which is supposed to have 9 hours a week of time outside of class. Oftentimes, we as a group spent over 9 hours in a day easily on this project, at times going to 12+ hours. This project would have been much better suited for a year long class. ENAE483, while interesting at times, was completely useless. Listening to a grab bag of topics that go no more in depth than what an hour or two of internet research can tell us does not help us at all for our design project. What we should have been doing was working on the Exospheres vehicle with Akin and the grad students the entire time. The first couple weeks of class, we were given a classroom and told to start designing. Since this was our 'design' time, Akin rarely was found during these class hours. Because of this, we all as a group were very confused on where to start as we were given no direction at all. Then after a week or two of this when he asks for our parts list. After seeing it, he basically goes on a rant, berating us since what we did 'was not engineering' and was 'a piece of shit' in his words. If we were given more specific directions and a guideline of expectations instead of “I want a parts list for this robot in 2 weeks. I'll see you then.” we would have been able to fufill this. I understand that the technical topics that we researched were covered in previous classes, but we needed a bit more guidance from the theory to applying it. It doesnt help when the grad students and Dr Akin himself are both very condescending and short when you try to ask for help. That is, if you can find Dr. Akin in person long enough to ask him a question, because that is the ONLY way to get anything useful out of him. I've started to debate whether to title my subject line in emails to something along the lines of “RESULTS OF DARPA PROPOSAL” because I think he filters anything with ENAE484 to go to trash. Also, the grad students seem very annoyed to help us. Its painfully obvious that they see us as lowly undergrads incapable of understanding and checking numbers. In fact, at one point, it was a detriment as one grad student refused to put the 'OK' stamp to get parts ordered until he checked over every single part himself for a specific subgroup, something that was already double checked by avionics. In the end, it turns out there was no major problem, except for the fact that he delayed the order of parts. The Preliminary Design Reviews (PDR) and Critical Design Reviews (CDR) also seem useful in theory but bad in practice. The grad students that were so short to help us out before to answer any questions spend the 4 hours trying to find every single flaw in our design. At times, it felt like at least one of the grad students was intentionally trying to find flaws with the design. In the end, taking space track was my biggest regret of undergrad. I wish I could do it again but with Palumbo's capstone or design build fly. ENAE484 is a good idea in theory, but Dr. Akin implements it so horribly that I feel like he should be barred from ever teaching this course again. It's clear he spreads himself too thin and that the SSL has higher priority than 484 which is probably barely on his radar. Oh, and I marked N/A for 'Based on the quality of my work in this course, the grades I earned were “ because I have no idea how our grades are determined. I think he arbitrarily assigns people grades based on how much he likes us from the couple min of class he sees us in.
David Akin ENAE484 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/16/2012	I don't really know where to start here. So I'll start with this: If this course were indicative of what my real-world aerospace engineering career was going to be like, I would quit. If it were indicative of a single job I would find a new job, where I would not be miserable, and if it were indicative of the entire industry I would find a different industry. The project assigned is entirely unreasonable in scope. With under 20 of us, we were constantly scrambling in order to do what we hadn't necessarily been taught in the previous years. Many of the areas we needed to cover are taught as a graduate course devoted to a single topic, and not only had none of us taken that course, in many cases Dr. Akin was unable to help when asked questions on the topic. It is true to say that he didn't himself understand the project he assigned us. He has in fact on multiple occasions answered questions with false information simply because that was the impression he had of what the physical reality was. It happened to be the wrong impression. To some degree it is hard to say what Dr. Akin could and couldn't help with, because he tended to not respond to emails asking for help. He also tended to show up to class late, or, on multiple occasions, not at all. He split the class into two sections, which means that his attention (already not sufficient) was divided between the two groups. Even had we had the support which we needed, this course would still have required too much work. At three credits it should be nine hours of work (counting in-class work) per week for fifteen weeks, or 135 hours over the semester. I -- along with many of my group members -- put in that amount of work in less than five weeks. And then we did it again. And then again. We worked as hard as we could for our first design presentation, and it was nowhere near good enough. This was due to two factors. 1) We didn't know what we were doing. ENAE483 had not prepared us for this experience, for researching things which our professor could not help with, for becoming experts on topics we'd never considered before in such a short time span. 2) There weren't enough of us to do the work. As I mentioned before, there were a lot of people who invested a lot of time in this course, frequently letting jobs, other classes, and personal commitments fall to the side. And it wasn't enough. We got ripped apart during our presentation, and it wasn't at all in a constructive manner. It consisted of Dr. Akin and his graduate students mocking our attempts at analysis, asking questions to try to trip us up and laughing if they succeeded, and generally trying to prove that they were superior to us in knowledge. This was no surprise to me, they were graduate students and a professor who had had more time to learn these things. There is a lot more I could say, but I'll keep it now to this: almost everyone I speak to in my group says they wish they had gone air track because and only because of this course, Dr. Akin shouldn't be permitted to teach undergraduates, and I really loathed this course. The last five months have been miserable because of it.
David Akin ENAE484 Expecting a B angryfred 04/28/2012	The previous review hits it on the dot. He is the sole reason why you should avoid the space track. It really is that miserable.
David Akin ENAE484 Expecting a C Anonymous 03/07/2012	Dr. Akin is consistently unclear with his expectations. On top of being virtually entirely inaccessible, Dr. Akin is equally as unhelpful in guiding you through the design process. In ENAE483, he will not return your homeworks or midterm, so you will receive no feedback from him throughout the course. I have no idea how he grades that course. ENAE484 is a followup course to ENAE483, where you are expected to design a mission from scratch. Dr. Akin does not equip you with the tools or resources to be able to do this adequately, and then he will rip you apart during your presentations including making fun of you. He has been in the field for many years where he has learned to develop an incredibly large ego. He will constantly cite his own "Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design." Law 4 reads, "Your best design efforts will inevitably wind up being useless in the final design. Learn to live with the disappointment." This is essentially his motto. He is rude and should not be allowed near students. Expect a negative experience. If you have not chosen whether you are doing the aero or astro track yet, I would honestly recommend you choose aero just to avoid him, or transfer to a university with an adequate design professor.