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Nam Sun Wang ENCH620 Anonymous 12/12/2021	It's been 7 years, so time to let everyone know: not much has changed. Probably the reason he hasn't gotten any other reviews during this time is that every CHBE/ENCH course only has one prof per semester, so there's not much point in giving reviews anyway. I suppose the one use of reading these bad reviews would be to warn students away from taking his tech elective, or encourage professional Masters students to take PDE instead since that also fills the requirement, but honestly at that point you've already taken 250 and are probably already aware of what this dude is like. He obviously doesn't do that much lesson planning, lectures with MathCad files that he writes on the fly (often getting stuck because he ends up having to debug in the middle of class), goes back to material from previous lectures to say that he made a mistake and that we have to change our notes, segues between topics in a nonsensical way etc. In both 250 and 620, there is an assumption that you are familiar with linear algebra. Since neither of these classes have linear algebra as prereqs, that's obviously not the case for most students. In my opinion, saying "students who haven't taken these courses are expected to do extra work to keep up" in the syllabus is a lazy cop out. Either require the course as a prerequisite or make the effort to teach the students the material as part of the course, especially when the course in question (LinAlg) has not been taken by the majority of students in his class. His explanations of fundamental concepts behind the applications that 250/620 are focused on are very poor. Homeworks: A high percentage of your grade. The one time his lectures are useful is when he does examples in class. If you see him coding, YOU MUST COPY DOWN EXACTLY WHAT HE WRITES IN HIS MATHCAD FILE! (And relatedly, make sure you have a functioning laptop before taking one of his classes) Those examples will often be identical to homework problems, and for that reason going to lectures can be incredibly useful. You likely won't be able to finish that homework problem without going to office hours otherwise. Office Hours are all but mandatory. The prof will stay late to help students out, but you will probably end up sacrificing one day of your week in office hours to get the homeworks done. I won't say they're impossible to do on your own (especially those in the first half of the semester), but the number of students capable of doing so make up a small minority of the class. He is not flexible on homeworks to individual students, but is usually very flexible if he perceives a consensus between all classmates. This is also true for take-home finals: if the class collectively votes for one, he's more than happy to accommodate. Exams: Extremely difficult. In both 250 and 620, focus on picking up the guaranteed easy points on the Gaussian Elimination/LU decomposition question (he takes off points for pivoting on that question by the way) on Midterm 1, and on everything else just do your best, but recognize that the averages are very low. For my class he graded exams fairly quickly, but that's atypical: normally, he returns exams much much later than when they are taken. Other than that, it's pretty easy to keep track of where you stand in the class, even if you don't get the material at all. For both the graduate and undergraduate programs, his class serves as a weedout/hazing course. If you are an undergrad: things get slightly better after 250 and 301. I doubt the faculty actually care about the fact that students aren't going to learn much in these classes, as long as its existence allows them to claim that UMD's programs are tough and have high workloads. I learned far more about what 250 was SUPPOSED to teach me when I took Dif E Q because of the Math department's superior professors, and through various YouTube videos on using MATLAB that I watched when taking other CHBE classes over the years. I've only ever found Prof. Wang to be respectful and friendly to students. I don't think he actively wants students to do badly in his class... he's just an atrociously bad teacher. The second worst professor I've ever had.