Thomas Biegel

This professor has taught: ENES220

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Thomas Biegel ENES102 Expecting a W Anonymous 12/22/2023	I took Biegel for ENES102 during the Fall 2023 semester and it was horrible. DO NOT take this professor, especially if you do not have a good physics background from high school. On the first day of class, Biegel spent 30 minutes talking about the sinking of the Titanic before even introducing himself or talking about the ENES102 syllabus. The class was online- we either attended on Zoom, which was exhausting and made it really hard to pay attention, or we went to a room in the chemical and nuclear engineering building and projected the Zoom meeting on the big screen. We had to figure out how to connect one of our classmate's computers to the projector ourselves; there was no TA or professor in the room to help us. Also, the lectures are simply videos posted on Canvas and are hard to follow. The textbook also does not help at all and was simply a set of PowerPoint slides from Fall 2016, and they did not even explain the general concepts or provide that many example problems. The example problems in the lectures did not have a lot of intermediate steps, so it was difficult to understand, especially because Biegel jumps straight into the example problems without explaining the theory first. Practice is essential to the understanding of the material and success in ENES102, but is nearly impossible if you do not have a solid understanding of the theory. I dropped the class because it was becoming hard to manage with my other classes, partly because I was a first semester freshman; I highly suggest taking PHYS161 before ENES102 since ENES102 is essentially an application of the material from PHYS161. I regret not taking PHYS161 first and developed most of my understanding of the ENES102 material from either my study group in the class or Dr. Bowden's guided study sessions. If you take ENES102, ALWAYS GO TO PROFESSOR BOWDEN'S GUIDED STUDY SESSIONS; THEY ARE ABSOLUTELY LIFESAVING! Also, if you struggle in ENES102, go to the Keystone office hours in JMP; the TAs are really helpful and explain the hard PrairieLearn problems in detail and simplify them down so that you understand them really well. Also go to the other professors' office hours posted in the ENES102 portal; that really helped me before I dropped the class.