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Tom Gleason PHYS170 Expecting an A+ Elliott_Dansberger 04/19/2026	Plain and simple, this required class is a joke that exists for the physics department to pat itself on the shoulders and say to itself "we introduced them to the major." At no point in the entire semester did any assignment, discussion, or project feel like it had meaning, relevance, or any purpose but to legitimize the class as a waste of your time. The class meets once weekly on Wednesdays and the schedule is to get in a reading circle and talk about basic college 101 information, with the occasional guest lecture or short project to break up the monotony. At times you'll read an article/document and form a milquetoast opinion on it to get your participation in. The final for the class was a project where we drew one place on campus and gave a synopsis of why it mattered to us. You may be interested and enjoy the idea of a free final (where drawing skill is not at all necessary) to boost your grade, but the honest truth is that outside of skipping every lecture you're going to have a perfect A anyway. Ultimately, the class will cause you to dread Wednesdays as it serves as a time vampire to your semester. While the class may be a waste of time, there are still good features to it that pull it out of 1-star. For starters, the grade is an easy A and the effort required is as little as it gets for a college course, which is great for GPA and not worrying about the class. On top of this, Tom is a very nice guy who tries to make class enjoyable despite the difficulty in doing so, and this class serves as an opportunity to build rapport with Tom if he is your advisor as a physics major. Finally, there are 3-4 guest physics lecturers throughout the semester that range from pointless to genuinely interesting, so once or twice you may have a good reason to pay attention. Overall, it serves as a required stepping stone for pursuing the physics major, but just about nothing more.