ENEE413 | PlanetTerp

Information	Review
Danilo Romero ENEE413 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/18/2024	Taking this class with Romero was one of the worst experiences of my academic career. I will preface this with saying that he's a nice guy overall, very willing to explain things, and won't give you too much grief individually. He'll move deadlines when asked for more time, and is generally a chill guy. If you've taken this course before, and need to retake it for a passing grade, then this might be your best bet. However, taking this course for the first time I would highly recommend literally anyone else: To start, the lectures are fairly standard but not really all that helpful. I'm not sure if it's his style or the lack of low-level explanations, but his lectures lack that certain quality that makes lectures good for taking notes in. The closest I ever got to taking good notes was by copying all the slides before hand, and notating in the margins on OneNote. The homework starts off relatively light, but quickly become completely undoable. The practice questions you get in class, will only be tangentially related to what you'll do on the homework, and you will struggle to understand the connection most of the time unless it's one of the rare questions that can be solved by a straightforward application of formulas. Notation for constants and certain values will change between the lectures and the slides, and you simply have to figure out what it's supposed to mean. You will be frequently given incompatible units and have to convert them. His solutions will frequently have results and units that don't make sense (e.g: Farads per centimeter will magically become microFarads per centimeter despite no conversions being specified, or without even solving or an intermediate, equivalent number in original units). You will not receive timely feedback from either him or the TA on your assignments. You will only receive feedback the day before, or perhaps the day of a test, meaning that you won't know if you don't understand something until the day of the test. Nor will you know if you don't understand the previous material, before moving on to the material that builds on top of it. Have you given up yet? No? Ok, bet. You will get trick questions. Not the normal trick questions where you get extraneous information to bait you into applying the wrong formulas or methods. But you'll get trick questions where you are straight up not directly given needed information, and instead that information will be hidden as something like an equation to a line, in a graph. So not only will you need that equation, but you'll need to quickly recognize that the missing information that you're searching for is in this equation, and not mentioned anywhere else, and only then can you begin very long calculation problems with many moving parts that're easy to mistype on a calculator. You will be have homework on obscure topics in the lecture, that you barely went over and that will be graded just as harshly as everything else. You will be tested about things that you never had a practice problem about, and you're expected to know it well enough to answer a trick question on it. Your TA will not specifically mark what you did wrong on your homework paper, will just mark the answer wrong and keep on moving to the point you'll have to wait until the answer key is released in order to assess what you did wrong, and then have to argue whether or not you deserve partial credit which you usually won't get. On top of all of this, none of the problems are difficult if you know and recognize the method behind them. The thing is you aren't taught to recognize or know the methods used on them and are expected to come up with them based on intuitive knowledge that can't be properly developed without practice, which you don't get because you basically never get feedback except for when it's too late and by the end, you leave feeling as though you haven't learned anything, and unprepared to apply anything you've "learned". The only saving grace is the grading curve w/ 50% being the minimum for a C-. If you're taking this class to learn something, you'll be disappointed. If you're taking this class because it's a requirement then my best advice is to take it with literally anyone else unless you've already been through it once before with someone else. If you can't, make sure to study with classmates, compare notes, and ask questions literally every opportunity you get.
Kevin Daniels ENEE413 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/24/2022	The best ever.
Kevin Daniels ENEE413 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/24/2019	Kevin Daniels is a great professor who cares more about you learning and being able to speak the semiconductor and device language rather than get bogged down with formulas. He cares about he success of his students, and I would highly recommend taking his class if available.

Danilo Romero
ENEE413

Expecting a B
Anonymous
05/18/2024

Taking this class with Romero was one of the worst experiences of my academic career. I will preface this with saying that he's a nice guy overall, very willing to explain things, and won't give you too much grief individually. He'll move deadlines when asked for more time, and is generally a chill guy. If you've taken this course before, and need to retake it for a passing grade, then this might be your best bet. However, taking this course for the first time I would highly recommend literally anyone else: To start, the lectures are fairly standard but not really all that helpful. I'm not sure if it's his style or the lack of low-level explanations, but his lectures lack that certain quality that makes lectures good for taking notes in. The closest I ever got to taking good notes was by copying all the slides before hand, and notating in the margins on OneNote. The homework starts off relatively light, but quickly become completely undoable. The practice questions you get in class, will only be tangentially related to what you'll do on the homework, and you will struggle to understand the connection most of the time unless it's one of the rare questions that can be solved by a straightforward application of formulas. Notation for constants and certain values will change between the lectures and the slides, and you simply have to figure out what it's supposed to mean. You will be frequently given incompatible units and have to convert them. His solutions will frequently have results and units that don't make sense (e.g: Farads per centimeter will magically become microFarads per centimeter despite no conversions being specified, or without even solving or an intermediate, equivalent number in original units). You will not receive timely feedback from either him or the TA on your assignments. You will only receive feedback the day before, or perhaps the day of a test, meaning that you won't know if you don't understand something until the day of the test. Nor will you know if you don't understand the previous material, before moving on to the material that builds on top of it. Have you given up yet? No? Ok, bet. You will get trick questions. Not the normal trick questions where you get extraneous information to bait you into applying the wrong formulas or methods. But you'll get trick questions where you are straight up not directly given needed information, and instead that information will be hidden as something like an equation to a line, in a graph. So not only will you need that equation, but you'll need to quickly recognize that the missing information that you're searching for is in this equation, and not mentioned anywhere else, and only then can you begin very long calculation problems with many moving parts that're easy to mistype on a calculator. You will be have homework on obscure topics in the lecture, that you barely went over and that will be graded just as harshly as everything else. You will be tested about things that you never had a practice problem about, and you're expected to know it well enough to answer a trick question on it. Your TA will not specifically mark what you did wrong on your homework paper, will just mark the answer wrong and keep on moving to the point you'll have to wait until the answer key is released in order to assess what you did wrong, and then have to argue whether or not you deserve partial credit which you usually won't get. On top of all of this, none of the problems are difficult if you know and recognize the method behind them. The thing is you aren't taught to recognize or know the methods used on them and are expected to come up with them based on intuitive knowledge that can't be properly developed without practice, which you don't get because you basically never get feedback except for when it's too late and by the end, you leave feeling as though you haven't learned anything, and unprepared to apply anything you've "learned". The only saving grace is the grading curve w/ 50% being the minimum for a C-. If you're taking this class to learn something, you'll be disappointed. If you're taking this class because it's a requirement then my best advice is to take it with literally anyone else unless you've already been through it once before with someone else. If you can't, make sure to study with classmates, compare notes, and ask questions literally every opportunity you get.

Kevin Daniels
ENEE413

Expecting an A
Anonymous
05/24/2022

The best ever.

Kevin Daniels
ENEE413

Expecting an A
Anonymous
05/24/2019

Kevin Daniels is a great professor who cares more about you learning and being able to speak the semiconductor and device language rather than get bogged down with formulas. He cares about he success of his students, and I would highly recommend taking his class if available.

Reviews for ENEE413