ENME400 | PlanetTerp

Information	Review
Chandrasekhar Thamire ENME400 Expecting a C- Anonymous 08/22/2023	Completely agree with a previous review calling ENME400 "Dynamics II w/3 lectures about belts and bearings". It's completely based around your ability to rapidly do moment and force balances and calculating unknown parameters. Class is taught well (though a lot of time is spent on derivations instead of useful examples, like Fluid Dynamics and Heat Transfer), but exams are very hit or miss. There's too much material asked in a short amount of time and it's very much geared towards students who have a near-perfect understanding of the material, which is difficult especially during a seasonal semester. Instead of adjusting the exams themselves, Thamire will arbitrarily "curve" them by setting the highest score in the class as a 100% - this I feel isn't a very fair system as the entire class is competing against the most elite performing students. He also stopped giving exam review practice problems after the first exam, expecting us to review based off homework problems only - prepare. To conclude, Thamire is a very professional and pleasant professor to learn from, but is not as forgiving on exams, instead compensating for low performance with extra credit participation in-class assignments and quizzes (that don't have answer solutions even after you use up all your tries). Students who are well-versed and adept to the material should find themselves with not too many problems, other than VERY limited time for the amount of work on exams, but if you struggle with Dynamics/Statics force and moment balances, prepare accordingly. He doesn't slow down for the weakest in the pack and judges everyone against the highest performers instead of an actual curve.
Joseph Telegadas ENME400 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/25/2022	Joseph is SUPER helpful for ENME 400. He has been a TA for 400 for multiple semesters and knows the content very well. He goes over the homework problems and answers any questions clearly and thoroughly for students to understand. His office hours were full of students as he was very helpful during the semester. If he is the TA for 400, be sure to go to his office hours to learn the content and ask questions!
Teng Li ENME400 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/25/2022	In regards to ENME 400, Dr. Li was not the best for this course. Dr. Li taught 400 similar to ENES 220 (mechanics 2), but that made the course more confusing. Dr. Li uses power points to cover content, but that was not the most beneficial as he sped through the content while students were writing stuff down still. Utilizing TA office hours was the best way to learn the content. Homework and group project assignments were hard, but the TAs were helpful. In regards to the project, if you have a bad group, it will be really hard to do well on it. BE SURE TO HAVE A GOOD GROUP! In regards to exams, Dr. Li's exams were easy as they mirrored his review sessions, but Dr. Li solves problems differently than how the homework would be solved. If possible, choose Dr. Thamire for ENME 400 to better understand the content for this course.
Chandrasekhar Thamire ENME400 Expecting a B- Anonymous 12/24/2022	Thamire is very intense. I think ENME 400 is a difficult course regardless of the instructor, but I could tell that Thamire made every attempt to be thoughtful and reasonable when adjusting expectations and trying to teach us as much as possible in the limited time allotted. He's a great professor, but he WILL demand a lot from you.
Chandrasekhar Thamire ENME400 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/20/2022	I transferred to UMD from a community college with little remembrance about statics and dynamics. I was extremely worried about this class because I have heard horror stories about this class. Do not let the negative comments scare you. This class is one of the classes I actually enjoyed having no background knowledge in anything in regards to machines or gears, belts, pulleys - yeah anything you can name. If you put in the time and work by doing the homework and show up to class, you will be fine. Be prepared to do a lot of memorization of steps and formulas because when it comes to exams, you have an hour 15 minutes to do 3 problems and the time goes by QUICK, also Dr. Thamire does not give a good formula sheet. Homework's can be a tad bit lengthy but still manageable. Dr. Thamire is a great professor. He wants his students to learn and ask questions. If he sees that you are trying to understand and that you are doing your best, he will help you out the best he can. There were a lot of people who complained about him-not sure why. He gave us extra credit quizzes to help our grade, extended deadlines to homework and studios a few times to help us as well. He does tend to go fast in lecture because he has material that needs to be covered in 1 semester but he really goes out of his way to help his students who wants the help. If you can do the homework and studio problems, you should be able fine on the exam. The project is not that bad, he makes it manageable. There are parts that are a little harder than others but still manageable. I promise you, compared to other UMD ME students I feel dumb as rocks and I still did well on exams. Just make sure you put time into this class and you will be fine.
Chandrasekhar Thamire ENME400 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/17/2022	Dr. Thamire ENME400 class has been one of my favorite classes so far. The course work is challenging but as long as you put in the effort to learn it you will succeed. His is always willing to help students succeed and is very helpful.
Chandrasekhar Thamire ENME400 Expecting a B Anonymous 08/24/2022	This class was so frustrating. It should be renamed from "Machine Design" to "Dynamics II w/3 lectures about belts and bearings". I was so excited to learn about... designing machines. We learned a bit about belt and pulley systems, then some about bearings and shafts and otherwise this class felt like an exercise in extra annoying dynamics with extra harsh grading. You need to be good with force and moment balancing, start reviewing now if you haven't done it in a while. My biggest gripe by far, is that Thamire from day one will spend something like 10-15 minutes per week telling you that half the class will fail and you should drop it. What a lovely and encouraging thing to hear from your professor, especially when he's the only option for this class. He will also threaten to call the FBI on anyone that uses chegg and has apparently done that before (yes this actually was stated the first week LOL). Spends a lot of time talking down on non-engineering professions and on bad engineering students. I was told to drop the class after getting an F on the first exam, but ended up passing just fine. Something like 15% of our class didn't get the C- they need, I believe this was a pretty low % compared to usual for him. The homework can be extremely time consuming, and the textbooks are of little to no use. Attendance is basically mandatory as he will give in class participation grades and that's the only time you'll see how to solve the homework, even though he commonly makes mistakes on lecture material since he does it all from memory. You must do everything you can to get good grades on the homework as I strongly believe he bases exam grading leniency based on homework performance. Lectures will spend an absolutely obnoxious amount of time on deriving equations and far too little on solving problems, as seems to be tradition at UMD. Exams are somewhat reasonable. They are basically identical to homework with a few slight changes. The best thing you can do is completely memorize the homework solutions. You can easily get a good grade in as long as you can memorize the homework solutions and recite them on paper in 15-20 minutes. Exams will be extremely long and you will most likely not finish, but there is a standard exam curve where highest grade gets rounded to 100, and all others accordingly. There's a lot of opportunity for extra credit, but again he really wants a lot of kids to fail which is so annoying. He will dock points over asinine things, such as putting a bearing on a FBD. There is a studio team project that I hear is pretty bad during the regular fall/spring semesters but was overall pretty easy during the summer session. The studio for our class at least served as an easy grade booster. Be ready to work hard, but you can get a good grade in this class. Just don't expect to be designing transmissions and engines when you're done.
Chandrasekhar Thamire ENME400 Anonymous 06/01/2022	Thamire is a nice guy. His class however is incredibly difficult. The homework is time-consuming. Our studio, which was to design a motor and pulley system and to conduct various failure analyses on it, made no sense - we ended up needing a 9-foot-long pulley because of his initial design requirements. This is unrealistic and the other measurements we got were crazy too, but he would always talk about design in a real-world scenario. Anytime my friends or I would email him with questions he would respond with answers that were unhelpful. The good thing is he will tell you the topics that each question will be on, but the questions themselves can be pretty hard (but relatively fair). Most people I knew did not like his lectures or his pace and his notes are hard to read/follow. Probably the hardest course I have taken in my four years at UMD. It felt like a 400-level weed-out course.
Chandrasekhar Thamire ENME400 Anonymous 04/22/2021	Dr. Thamire is a great teacher who is always open to questions and wants to help students. While it might take some time to get used to drawing some of the figures he draws (he is basically an artist), overall, the class is very well-taught. As for the workload, it definitely is manageable. Exams were fair and reasonable.
Chandrasekhar Thamire ENME400 Expecting an A Anonymous 02/02/2021	I love Thamire, but this class is painful at times. He does a great job with drawing figures and is honestly a pretty good teacher. Despite going really fast, you never end up covering as much as what is lined out in the syllabus. The homework is fine, the studio assignments are a tedious but doable group project, and the exams are reasonable but a time crunch.
Chandrasekhar Thamire ENME400 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/21/2020	He kinda took academic integrity to a whole different level. We had to show our exam papers on zoom 5 minutes before the exam is over, which a lot of us forgot to do because we were trying to finish up the exam. And he tried to punish the students who genuinely forgot to do so. I understand where he is coming from but it was kind of anal. Did not want to upload his zoom lectures because he worried about "lower viewership". I think he should have uploaded the recorded lecture even if it costs the amount of the viewership. The learning outcome is more important and students could greatly benefit from recorded lectures especially for courses like this. Explains concepts really well but sometimes repeats very basic things over and over every lecture. Nice guy and very pleasant to interact with. 400 is a hard course but he probably could do it better than anyone else. I'm glad that he taught us 400.
Chandrasekhar Thamire ENME400 Expecting an A mechE98 05/20/2019	Thamire is a really nice guy and is sorta funny sometimes (without trying to be), but he is immensely boring in lecture. Furthermore, the project for 400 is absolutely absurd and he does not teach or explain the concepts well. If you can take the class during the winter or summer I would because outside of the project the class is super easy.
Chandrasekhar Thamire ENME400 Expecting a B Anonymous 03/15/2019	I do not enjoy existing because of this class
Chandrasekhar Thamire ENME400 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/12/2018	Very intelligent person, but sometimes goes too in depth or has trouble explaining concepts. This might just be a ENME400 thing though.

Chandrasekhar Thamire
ENME400

Expecting a C-
Anonymous
08/22/2023

Completely agree with a previous review calling ENME400 "Dynamics II w/3 lectures about belts and bearings". It's completely based around your ability to rapidly do moment and force balances and calculating unknown parameters. Class is taught well (though a lot of time is spent on derivations instead of useful examples, like Fluid Dynamics and Heat Transfer), but exams are very hit or miss. There's too much material asked in a short amount of time and it's very much geared towards students who have a near-perfect understanding of the material, which is difficult especially during a seasonal semester. Instead of adjusting the exams themselves, Thamire will arbitrarily "curve" them by setting the highest score in the class as a 100% - this I feel isn't a very fair system as the entire class is competing against the most elite performing students. He also stopped giving exam review practice problems after the first exam, expecting us to review based off homework problems only - prepare. To conclude, Thamire is a very professional and pleasant professor to learn from, but is not as forgiving on exams, instead compensating for low performance with extra credit participation in-class assignments and quizzes (that don't have answer solutions even after you use up all your tries). Students who are well-versed and adept to the material should find themselves with not too many problems, other than VERY limited time for the amount of work on exams, but if you struggle with Dynamics/Statics force and moment balances, prepare accordingly. He doesn't slow down for the weakest in the pack and judges everyone against the highest performers instead of an actual curve.

Joseph Telegadas
ENME400

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
12/25/2022

Joseph is SUPER helpful for ENME 400. He has been a TA for 400 for multiple semesters and knows the content very well. He goes over the homework problems and answers any questions clearly and thoroughly for students to understand. His office hours were full of students as he was very helpful during the semester. If he is the TA for 400, be sure to go to his office hours to learn the content and ask questions!

Teng Li
ENME400

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
12/25/2022

In regards to ENME 400, Dr. Li was not the best for this course. Dr. Li taught 400 similar to ENES 220 (mechanics 2), but that made the course more confusing. Dr. Li uses power points to cover content, but that was not the most beneficial as he sped through the content while students were writing stuff down still. Utilizing TA office hours was the best way to learn the content. Homework and group project assignments were hard, but the TAs were helpful. In regards to the project, if you have a bad group, it will be really hard to do well on it. BE SURE TO HAVE A GOOD GROUP! In regards to exams, Dr. Li's exams were easy as they mirrored his review sessions, but Dr. Li solves problems differently than how the homework would be solved. If possible, choose Dr. Thamire for ENME 400 to better understand the content for this course.

Chandrasekhar Thamire
ENME400

Expecting a B-
Anonymous
12/24/2022

Thamire is very intense. I think ENME 400 is a difficult course regardless of the instructor, but I could tell that Thamire made every attempt to be thoughtful and reasonable when adjusting expectations and trying to teach us as much as possible in the limited time allotted. He's a great professor, but he WILL demand a lot from you.

Chandrasekhar Thamire
ENME400

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
12/20/2022

I transferred to UMD from a community college with little remembrance about statics and dynamics. I was extremely worried about this class because I have heard horror stories about this class. Do not let the negative comments scare you. This class is one of the classes I actually enjoyed having no background knowledge in anything in regards to machines or gears, belts, pulleys - yeah anything you can name. If you put in the time and work by doing the homework and show up to class, you will be fine. Be prepared to do a lot of memorization of steps and formulas because when it comes to exams, you have an hour 15 minutes to do 3 problems and the time goes by QUICK, also Dr. Thamire does not give a good formula sheet. Homework's can be a tad bit lengthy but still manageable. Dr. Thamire is a great professor. He wants his students to learn and ask questions. If he sees that you are trying to understand and that you are doing your best, he will help you out the best he can. There were a lot of people who complained about him-not sure why. He gave us extra credit quizzes to help our grade, extended deadlines to homework and studios a few times to help us as well. He does tend to go fast in lecture because he has material that needs to be covered in 1 semester but he really goes out of his way to help his students who wants the help. If you can do the homework and studio problems, you should be able fine on the exam. The project is not that bad, he makes it manageable. There are parts that are a little harder than others but still manageable. I promise you, compared to other UMD ME students I feel dumb as rocks and I still did well on exams. Just make sure you put time into this class and you will be fine.

Chandrasekhar Thamire
ENME400

Expecting an A
Anonymous
12/17/2022

Dr. Thamire ENME400 class has been one of my favorite classes so far. The course work is challenging but as long as you put in the effort to learn it you will succeed. His is always willing to help students succeed and is very helpful.

Chandrasekhar Thamire
ENME400

Expecting a B
Anonymous
08/24/2022

This class was so frustrating. It should be renamed from "Machine Design" to "Dynamics II w/3 lectures about belts and bearings". I was so excited to learn about... designing machines. We learned a bit about belt and pulley systems, then some about bearings and shafts and otherwise this class felt like an exercise in extra annoying dynamics with extra harsh grading. You need to be good with force and moment balancing, start reviewing now if you haven't done it in a while. My biggest gripe by far, is that Thamire from day one will spend something like 10-15 minutes per week telling you that half the class will fail and you should drop it. What a lovely and encouraging thing to hear from your professor, especially when he's the only option for this class. He will also threaten to call the FBI on anyone that uses chegg and has apparently done that before (yes this actually was stated the first week LOL). Spends a lot of time talking down on non-engineering professions and on bad engineering students. I was told to drop the class after getting an F on the first exam, but ended up passing just fine. Something like 15% of our class didn't get the C- they need, I believe this was a pretty low % compared to usual for him. The homework can be extremely time consuming, and the textbooks are of little to no use. Attendance is basically mandatory as he will give in class participation grades and that's the only time you'll see how to solve the homework, even though he commonly makes mistakes on lecture material since he does it all from memory. You must do everything you can to get good grades on the homework as I strongly believe he bases exam grading leniency based on homework performance. Lectures will spend an absolutely obnoxious amount of time on deriving equations and far too little on solving problems, as seems to be tradition at UMD. Exams are somewhat reasonable. They are basically identical to homework with a few slight changes. The best thing you can do is completely memorize the homework solutions. You can easily get a good grade in as long as you can memorize the homework solutions and recite them on paper in 15-20 minutes. Exams will be extremely long and you will most likely not finish, but there is a standard exam curve where highest grade gets rounded to 100, and all others accordingly. There's a lot of opportunity for extra credit, but again he really wants a lot of kids to fail which is so annoying. He will dock points over asinine things, such as putting a bearing on a FBD. There is a studio team project that I hear is pretty bad during the regular fall/spring semesters but was overall pretty easy during the summer session. The studio for our class at least served as an easy grade booster. Be ready to work hard, but you can get a good grade in this class. Just don't expect to be designing transmissions and engines when you're done.

Chandrasekhar Thamire
ENME400

Anonymous
06/01/2022

Thamire is a nice guy. His class however is incredibly difficult. The homework is time-consuming. Our studio, which was to design a motor and pulley system and to conduct various failure analyses on it, made no sense - we ended up needing a 9-foot-long pulley because of his initial design requirements. This is unrealistic and the other measurements we got were crazy too, but he would always talk about design in a real-world scenario. Anytime my friends or I would email him with questions he would respond with answers that were unhelpful. The good thing is he will tell you the topics that each question will be on, but the questions themselves can be pretty hard (but relatively fair). Most people I knew did not like his lectures or his pace and his notes are hard to read/follow. Probably the hardest course I have taken in my four years at UMD. It felt like a 400-level weed-out course.

Chandrasekhar Thamire
ENME400

Anonymous
04/22/2021

Dr. Thamire is a great teacher who is always open to questions and wants to help students. While it might take some time to get used to drawing some of the figures he draws (he is basically an artist), overall, the class is very well-taught. As for the workload, it definitely is manageable. Exams were fair and reasonable.

Chandrasekhar Thamire
ENME400

Expecting an A
Anonymous
02/02/2021

I love Thamire, but this class is painful at times. He does a great job with drawing figures and is honestly a pretty good teacher. Despite going really fast, you never end up covering as much as what is lined out in the syllabus. The homework is fine, the studio assignments are a tedious but doable group project, and the exams are reasonable but a time crunch.

Chandrasekhar Thamire
ENME400

Expecting an A
Anonymous
12/21/2020

He kinda took academic integrity to a whole different level. We had to show our exam papers on zoom 5 minutes before the exam is over, which a lot of us forgot to do because we were trying to finish up the exam. And he tried to punish the students who genuinely forgot to do so. I understand where he is coming from but it was kind of anal. Did not want to upload his zoom lectures because he worried about "lower viewership". I think he should have uploaded the recorded lecture even if it costs the amount of the viewership. The learning outcome is more important and students could greatly benefit from recorded lectures especially for courses like this. Explains concepts really well but sometimes repeats very basic things over and over every lecture. Nice guy and very pleasant to interact with. 400 is a hard course but he probably could do it better than anyone else. I'm glad that he taught us 400.

Chandrasekhar Thamire
ENME400

Expecting an A
mechE98
05/20/2019

Thamire is a really nice guy and is sorta funny sometimes (without trying to be), but he is immensely boring in lecture. Furthermore, the project for 400 is absolutely absurd and he does not teach or explain the concepts well. If you can take the class during the winter or summer I would because outside of the project the class is super easy.

Chandrasekhar Thamire
ENME400

Expecting a B
Anonymous
03/15/2019

I do not enjoy existing because of this class

Chandrasekhar Thamire
ENME400

Expecting a B
Anonymous
12/12/2018

Very intelligent person, but sometimes goes too in depth or has trouble explaining concepts. This might just be a ENME400 thing though.

Reviews for ENME400