ENME382 | PlanetTerp

Information	Review
Carlos Rios Ocampo ENME382 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 05/20/2024	I was nervous to take this professor since he had 0 reviews, but I can genuinely say that he's the best professor for ENMA300/ENME382! I would highly recommend taking him over Martinez-Miranda. There's a ton of content in this class, but he lectures as well as he can given the sheer amount he has to cover. He's not an especially riveting lecturer (I'd say you can keep up in class just by reading the textbook or lecture slides), but he tries his best to make everything accessible—he posts recordings of all classes and review sessions, lecture slides, and review problem slides, which I really appreciated. He can be pretty funny sometimes and he's generally chill and likeable. His exams are straightforward and fair, and very doable if you have a good equation sheet. He's also incredibly kind and understanding when it comes to personal issues, and his office hours are insanely helpful—I rarely went to class, but went to his office hours almost every week. He was always incredibly patient and friendly, and made sure everybody got their questions fully answered. If you're interested in materials science and want any sort of general advice, he's also super open to chatting about that. He's just an all around solid professor who clearly cares about his students and his class content.
Luz Martinez-Miranda ENME382 Expecting an A- Anonymous 04/11/2024	Absolutely horrendous professor would definitely push this class off a semester if she is the only option. Does not know how to teach whatsoever, struggles to read off a powerpoint, specifically has TAs grade assignments harshly. Only good thing about the class is that you get a two page cheat sheet in addition to given equations.
Samuel Schwarm ENME382 Expecting an A- Anonymous 02/18/2024	The midterm exam and final are heavily RNG
Francis Mccluskey ENME382 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/18/2024	Solid professor. Nice guy. Exams are very fair and are very similar to HW. Only real downside is that he is a little boring.
Isabel Lloyd ENME382 Expecting a C+ Anonymous 05/27/2023	She's okay. Her lectures are very conceptual and she does have a tendency to go off on tangents that aren't related to what you need to know which can make the lectures boring to listen to when you only need like 1/4 of the information. She also won't post most of the recordings for the lectures and she'll hide the example slides in the powerpoints she posts to "encourage students to attend class." Also the other professor curved because our averages on all our exams were around 60% but she didn't cure which was a little frustrating. Also not sure if it was her or the TAs but they were super behind on grading and I'm half convinced they just made up our grade at the end because a good portion of our assignments, particularly our project assignments, were never input into canvas or gradescope.
Samuel Schwarm ENME382 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/27/2023	Tbh seems like a nice guy, just very boring lectures so eventually the majority of the class stops attending. The homework and assignments are the shared between the teachers I believe. His final, I don't know if it was shared, but it was completely a game of luck.
Isabel Lloyd ENME382 Anonymous 05/09/2023	Nice lady but a HORRIBLE TEACHER. I literally know next to nothing going into the final and I pretty much always go to class. Also the group project for this class is a nightmare.
Samuel Schwarm ENME382 Expecting a B+ petergriffin69 02/28/2023	The lectures can drag on a bit, especially if you take the 1:15 hr session of this class. However some parts of the lecture were pretty interesting as he was able to relate certain topics to his day job and real world applications outside of this course. The exams are lightning fast and I would run out of time and would end up having to skip a whole question and it's subparts on both the midterm and final. However, this is no fault of his own since the exams administered in ENME382 are created with the input of all the other professors teaching the course. The exams are not that difficult if you have a good equation sheet, and I was able to catch the average and more skipping entire questions. Overall, the man knows how to run a class. He didn't make the course any more difficult than it had to like other professors tend to do here at UMD. Being a Mech E, I won't see him again, but I would take another class with him if the opportunity presented itself. He was very approachable and respectful everytime I was one on one with him. Stay up, King🙏🤝.
Patrick McCluskey ENME382 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/28/2022	Dr. McCluskey is a very nice guy, but his class is extremely disorganized. Lectures are super boring -- he just reads from the slides, but too quickly for you to take good notes. There is a ridiculous amount of content in this class. I found it really hard to study for the midterm and final because I couldn't distinguish which content he would actually test us on out of the hundreds of slides he went through. The homeworks were too long and were graded harshly. If you have a choice to take 382 with a different professor, I would not choose McCluskey, but if you do have to take it with him, it is definitely survivable.
Samuel Schwarm ENME382 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 05/27/2022	Avoid taking this class with Schwarm. He is not very good at teaching the content and skips over a lot of useful concepts during class. You will need to use the textbook to fully understand how to do the homework problems. He gives a lot of homework as well which is just time consuming and does not really reflect the difficulty of the exams. He designs the exams so that HE can finish it in 50 minutes. He makes excuses for his poor teaching by saying that he worked for the Navy. It does not make much sense at all. However, the course project is complete bs and no one really knows what is going on so everyone does well. Schwarm sucks, but the class is not tooooo horrible. Just read the textbook.
Aristos Christou ENME382 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 05/15/2022	Writing a nice review for you future terps since no one seems to. Lectures: if you like listening to him read off the slides, go to lecture. If not, you can skip and you'll never miss anything. There was maybe 10-20 people in lecture when I went. Lecture content is very dry, especially the first month or so when it's all about crystals and you have no idea what the purpose is of anything you're learning. After first midterm the material got a bit more scientific so I felt like I was learning something and understanding the different material properties. Homework: Wiley plus easy stuff, the written homeworks are generally easy but can be a bit time consuming. You need to do your best to get 100% on all these. Exams: you're going to get basically zero practice material for these. Run through the wiley plus homework, try the practice exam, maybe find another older exam on course hero. Thankfully the exams aren't too terribly difficult. I did admittedly little preparation and got a 80 and 78 on the midterms. You get a 2 page note sheet for exams that should be more than enough to get enough info on there for a good grade. Oh they don't actually give you the practice exam. You have a watch a zoom recording of a TF walking through it. Yikes, very annoying. There is no final exam. Project: this is a huge portion of your grade. The project itself is pretty easy. 3x 2-page reports (you only write 1 each, then write comments on other people's reports), 1 big final report and a presentation. If your group is good you'll be set. If your group is lazy I hope you like doing the whole thing by yourself like I had to. Grading is generally pretty lenient but was a disaster this semester due to TAs doing who knows what. A lot of kids had zero grades until a few weeks before the final project was due. Write a lot. Technologically this class was a disaster. Tons of canvas and willey plus issues. You have to sort through 100 files to find the right lecture slides. Overall, easy class, optional attendance, I put in maybe 2-3 hours of work on this per week and should be getting a B+ or A- with minimal effort. Christou is a very nice guy and obviously likes what he does but not a whole lot to write home about in terms of his teaching.
Elisabeth Smela ENME382 Expecting an A Anonymous 11/21/2020	She definitely expects you to know a certain amount of fundamentals for this course. She'll loose patience answering questions she thinks you should know pretty quick. However, she's smart and obviously has a lot of real world experience with the material she's teaching. But her teaching style while online has been to jam a ton of reading and videos down our throats and then go over the books lecture slides during class. We'll literally get assigned 5-6 hours of preclass reading each week. Her grading is weird, but it gives you the ability to get an a B or above no problem. Personally though, she's very caring and wants us to succeed and learn genuinely. She'll be empathetic and push back due dates and offer extra office hours if needed. I like her, but she could be a better teacher.
Isabel Lloyd ENME382 Anonymous 05/10/2015	Dr. Lloyd does not have a good teaching style for college students. Most of us became disinterested very quickly, which is disappointing because it's a required subject. She uses new terms without bothering to ever explain what they are and throws in many unnecessary details about how things relate to her work, all in an attempt to maybe sound smarter. She does all this while using pointless anecdotes about her personal life, such as her ex-husband, that make us laugh over how contrived they are. Just her speaking style and body language is as if she is speaking to middle school students, not those in college. Her presentation slides are too wordy, which makes it pointless to try to take notes when she skips ahead quickly. Luckily she posts those slides online, which would have caused the majority of the class to not ever show up had it not been for the fact that she gives unannounced pop quizzes in order to have some attendance. Everything you need to know you can learn in the textbook. Grading is very inconsistent. Students who worked with each other on a homework could have grades that differ by over 10%. Questions on the exam also can be opinion-based for material selection problems and result in varying grades. Because you don't learn much in class, you are reliant on putting all the relevant information from the book and homework on the crib sheets you are allowed for the exams. I would recommend avoiding her unless you really love pointless stories early in the morning. I hope to never have her as a professor again.
Isabel Lloyd ENME382 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/19/2015	She is one of few professors I've had so far who genuinely has an interest in the topic she teaches and wants students to succeed. I found her attitude toward the material to be somewhat infectious, and probably found the class more interesting than if I had taken it with someone else. Her lectures can be somewhat scatterbrained, and I think at least once a week she brought up something from her personal life. She doesn't go off on long tangents about it, but it's still distracting. When she is on point, she focuses more on the bigger picture of the material, and expects you to dig in to the details on your own.
Isabel Lloyd ENME382 Expecting an A jschel 12/09/2014	I really liked her. She's not the best lecturer I've ever had, but she was pretty good. She definitely goes heavy on the conceptual end of things, but partly just because the course material was heavily conceptual. Pretty fair grading, for the most part. VERY willing to help students - wants them to succeed. Likes to go off on tangents; can be a little scattered. She really likes and cares about the material, which makes a huge difference. Overall, I would definitely recommend her.
Aristos Christou ENME382 Expecting an A- eiweiss 11/20/2013	Christou is actually one of the worst lecturers I have yet had. He reads off of the powerpoint (which he got from the publisher). I once counted that he said 'um' 100 times in 15 minutes of class. Class itself isn't terribly hard, though. Pop quizzes suck and make you show up. The textbook uses WileyPlus which runs you about $90, and he seems to have stopped using it half way through. Smart man, with a big office. Too bad he can't teach, I feel bad for the ENMAs.
Mohamad Al-Sheikhly ENME382 Expecting an A- seanziee 05/04/2013	The teaching was pretty poor. Professor was condescending to students, and it was hard to take notes during class because he would just talk and it was unclear what we should write. He took off points on exams for what it seems emotional reasons--stating that the answer wasn't good enough, without actually looking at what some of us wrote. He also took off full points on some questions because we wrote exactly what he wrote on a slide, and he thinks that we should "read the book"(which I did/do), not just look at the slides. Nevertheless the answer was correct, but his irrational reasoning led to getting full points off. He is also just a very difficult person to deal with. Not very available after class and he gives no respect to any student. He says we should discuss together during class, because that is the point of class, but many times he will tell people to put their hands down or just shut them down by saying, "Are you even paying attention??". So overall, the professor is disrespectful, doesn't teach well, and is irrational.
Aristos Christou ENME382 Expecting an A terp315 07/28/2010	Super boring lectures especially at 9 am. It combined some aspects of chem135 and enes220, though mainly just chemistry. I found the exams to be very fair - they were a mixture of numerical and short answer type questions. Just make sure to go through the powerpoints and homeworks and you should be fine.

Carlos Rios Ocampo
ENME382

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
05/20/2024

I was nervous to take this professor since he had 0 reviews, but I can genuinely say that he's the best professor for ENMA300/ENME382! I would highly recommend taking him over Martinez-Miranda. There's a ton of content in this class, but he lectures as well as he can given the sheer amount he has to cover. He's not an especially riveting lecturer (I'd say you can keep up in class just by reading the textbook or lecture slides), but he tries his best to make everything accessible—he posts recordings of all classes and review sessions, lecture slides, and review problem slides, which I really appreciated. He can be pretty funny sometimes and he's generally chill and likeable. His exams are straightforward and fair, and very doable if you have a good equation sheet. He's also incredibly kind and understanding when it comes to personal issues, and his office hours are insanely helpful—I rarely went to class, but went to his office hours almost every week. He was always incredibly patient and friendly, and made sure everybody got their questions fully answered. If you're interested in materials science and want any sort of general advice, he's also super open to chatting about that. He's just an all around solid professor who clearly cares about his students and his class content.

Luz Martinez-Miranda
ENME382

Expecting an A-
Anonymous
04/11/2024

Absolutely horrendous professor would definitely push this class off a semester if she is the only option. Does not know how to teach whatsoever, struggles to read off a powerpoint, specifically has TAs grade assignments harshly. Only good thing about the class is that you get a two page cheat sheet in addition to given equations.

Samuel Schwarm
ENME382

Expecting an A-
Anonymous
02/18/2024

The midterm exam and final are heavily RNG

Francis Mccluskey
ENME382

Expecting an A
Anonymous
01/18/2024

Solid professor. Nice guy. Exams are very fair and are very similar to HW. Only real downside is that he is a little boring.

Isabel Lloyd
ENME382

Expecting a C+
Anonymous
05/27/2023

She's okay. Her lectures are very conceptual and she does have a tendency to go off on tangents that aren't related to what you need to know which can make the lectures boring to listen to when you only need like 1/4 of the information. She also won't post most of the recordings for the lectures and she'll hide the example slides in the powerpoints she posts to "encourage students to attend class." Also the other professor curved because our averages on all our exams were around 60% but she didn't cure which was a little frustrating. Also not sure if it was her or the TAs but they were super behind on grading and I'm half convinced they just made up our grade at the end because a good portion of our assignments, particularly our project assignments, were never input into canvas or gradescope.

Samuel Schwarm
ENME382

Expecting an A
Anonymous
05/27/2023

Tbh seems like a nice guy, just very boring lectures so eventually the majority of the class stops attending. The homework and assignments are the shared between the teachers I believe. His final, I don't know if it was shared, but it was completely a game of luck.

Isabel Lloyd
ENME382

Anonymous
05/09/2023

Nice lady but a HORRIBLE TEACHER. I literally know next to nothing going into the final and I pretty much always go to class. Also the group project for this class is a nightmare.

Samuel Schwarm
ENME382

Expecting a B+
petergriffin69
02/28/2023

The lectures can drag on a bit, especially if you take the 1:15 hr session of this class. However some parts of the lecture were pretty interesting as he was able to relate certain topics to his day job and real world applications outside of this course. The exams are lightning fast and I would run out of time and would end up having to skip a whole question and it's subparts on both the midterm and final. However, this is no fault of his own since the exams administered in ENME382 are created with the input of all the other professors teaching the course. The exams are not that difficult if you have a good equation sheet, and I was able to catch the average and more skipping entire questions. Overall, the man knows how to run a class. He didn't make the course any more difficult than it had to like other professors tend to do here at UMD. Being a Mech E, I won't see him again, but I would take another class with him if the opportunity presented itself. He was very approachable and respectful everytime I was one on one with him. Stay up, King🙏🤝.

Patrick McCluskey
ENME382

Expecting a B
Anonymous
12/28/2022

Dr. McCluskey is a very nice guy, but his class is extremely disorganized. Lectures are super boring -- he just reads from the slides, but too quickly for you to take good notes. There is a ridiculous amount of content in this class. I found it really hard to study for the midterm and final because I couldn't distinguish which content he would actually test us on out of the hundreds of slides he went through. The homeworks were too long and were graded harshly. If you have a choice to take 382 with a different professor, I would not choose McCluskey, but if you do have to take it with him, it is definitely survivable.

Samuel Schwarm
ENME382

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
05/27/2022

Avoid taking this class with Schwarm. He is not very good at teaching the content and skips over a lot of useful concepts during class. You will need to use the textbook to fully understand how to do the homework problems. He gives a lot of homework as well which is just time consuming and does not really reflect the difficulty of the exams. He designs the exams so that HE can finish it in 50 minutes. He makes excuses for his poor teaching by saying that he worked for the Navy. It does not make much sense at all. However, the course project is complete bs and no one really knows what is going on so everyone does well. Schwarm sucks, but the class is not tooooo horrible. Just read the textbook.

Aristos Christou
ENME382

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
05/15/2022

Writing a nice review for you future terps since no one seems to. Lectures: if you like listening to him read off the slides, go to lecture. If not, you can skip and you'll never miss anything. There was maybe 10-20 people in lecture when I went. Lecture content is very dry, especially the first month or so when it's all about crystals and you have no idea what the purpose is of anything you're learning. After first midterm the material got a bit more scientific so I felt like I was learning something and understanding the different material properties. Homework: Wiley plus easy stuff, the written homeworks are generally easy but can be a bit time consuming. You need to do your best to get 100% on all these. Exams: you're going to get basically zero practice material for these. Run through the wiley plus homework, try the practice exam, maybe find another older exam on course hero. Thankfully the exams aren't too terribly difficult. I did admittedly little preparation and got a 80 and 78 on the midterms. You get a 2 page note sheet for exams that should be more than enough to get enough info on there for a good grade. Oh they don't actually give you the practice exam. You have a watch a zoom recording of a TF walking through it. Yikes, very annoying. There is no final exam. Project: this is a huge portion of your grade. The project itself is pretty easy. 3x 2-page reports (you only write 1 each, then write comments on other people's reports), 1 big final report and a presentation. If your group is good you'll be set. If your group is lazy I hope you like doing the whole thing by yourself like I had to. Grading is generally pretty lenient but was a disaster this semester due to TAs doing who knows what. A lot of kids had zero grades until a few weeks before the final project was due. Write a lot. Technologically this class was a disaster. Tons of canvas and willey plus issues. You have to sort through 100 files to find the right lecture slides. Overall, easy class, optional attendance, I put in maybe 2-3 hours of work on this per week and should be getting a B+ or A- with minimal effort. Christou is a very nice guy and obviously likes what he does but not a whole lot to write home about in terms of his teaching.

Elisabeth Smela
ENME382

Expecting an A
Anonymous
11/21/2020

She definitely expects you to know a certain amount of fundamentals for this course. She'll loose patience answering questions she thinks you should know pretty quick. However, she's smart and obviously has a lot of real world experience with the material she's teaching. But her teaching style while online has been to jam a ton of reading and videos down our throats and then go over the books lecture slides during class. We'll literally get assigned 5-6 hours of preclass reading each week. Her grading is weird, but it gives you the ability to get an a B or above no problem. Personally though, she's very caring and wants us to succeed and learn genuinely. She'll be empathetic and push back due dates and offer extra office hours if needed. I like her, but she could be a better teacher.

Isabel Lloyd
ENME382

Anonymous
05/10/2015

Dr. Lloyd does not have a good teaching style for college students. Most of us became disinterested very quickly, which is disappointing because it's a required subject. She uses new terms without bothering to ever explain what they are and throws in many unnecessary details about how things relate to her work, all in an attempt to maybe sound smarter. She does all this while using pointless anecdotes about her personal life, such as her ex-husband, that make us laugh over how contrived they are. Just her speaking style and body language is as if she is speaking to middle school students, not those in college. Her presentation slides are too wordy, which makes it pointless to try to take notes when she skips ahead quickly. Luckily she posts those slides online, which would have caused the majority of the class to not ever show up had it not been for the fact that she gives unannounced pop quizzes in order to have some attendance. Everything you need to know you can learn in the textbook. Grading is very inconsistent. Students who worked with each other on a homework could have grades that differ by over 10%. Questions on the exam also can be opinion-based for material selection problems and result in varying grades. Because you don't learn much in class, you are reliant on putting all the relevant information from the book and homework on the crib sheets you are allowed for the exams. I would recommend avoiding her unless you really love pointless stories early in the morning. I hope to never have her as a professor again.

Isabel Lloyd
ENME382

Expecting an A
Anonymous
01/19/2015

She is one of few professors I've had so far who genuinely has an interest in the topic she teaches and wants students to succeed. I found her attitude toward the material to be somewhat infectious, and probably found the class more interesting than if I had taken it with someone else. Her lectures can be somewhat scatterbrained, and I think at least once a week she brought up something from her personal life. She doesn't go off on long tangents about it, but it's still distracting. When she is on point, she focuses more on the bigger picture of the material, and expects you to dig in to the details on your own.

Isabel Lloyd
ENME382

Expecting an A
jschel
12/09/2014

I really liked her. She's not the best lecturer I've ever had, but she was pretty good. She definitely goes heavy on the conceptual end of things, but partly just because the course material was heavily conceptual. Pretty fair grading, for the most part. VERY willing to help students - wants them to succeed. Likes to go off on tangents; can be a little scattered. She really likes and cares about the material, which makes a huge difference. Overall, I would definitely recommend her.

Aristos Christou
ENME382

Expecting an A-
eiweiss
11/20/2013

Christou is actually one of the worst lecturers I have yet had. He reads off of the powerpoint (which he got from the publisher). I once counted that he said 'um' 100 times in 15 minutes of class. Class itself isn't terribly hard, though. Pop quizzes suck and make you show up. The textbook uses WileyPlus which runs you about $90, and he seems to have stopped using it half way through. Smart man, with a big office. Too bad he can't teach, I feel bad for the ENMAs.

Mohamad Al-Sheikhly
ENME382

Expecting an A-
seanziee
05/04/2013

The teaching was pretty poor. Professor was condescending to students, and it was hard to take notes during class because he would just talk and it was unclear what we should write. He took off points on exams for what it seems emotional reasons--stating that the answer wasn't good enough, without actually looking at what some of us wrote. He also took off full points on some questions because we wrote exactly what he wrote on a slide, and he thinks that we should "read the book"(which I did/do), not just look at the slides. Nevertheless the answer was correct, but his irrational reasoning led to getting full points off. He is also just a very difficult person to deal with. Not very available after class and he gives no respect to any student. He says we should discuss together during class, because that is the point of class, but many times he will tell people to put their hands down or just shut them down by saying, "Are you even paying attention??". So overall, the professor is disrespectful, doesn't teach well, and is irrational.

Aristos Christou
ENME382

Expecting an A
terp315
07/28/2010

Super boring lectures especially at 9 am. It combined some aspects of chem135 and enes220, though mainly just chemistry. I found the exams to be very fair - they were a mixture of numerical and short answer type questions. Just make sure to go through the powerpoints and homeworks and you should be fine.

Reviews for ENME382