Amanda Souna

This professor has taught: CHEM134, CHEM482, CHEM483, CHEM484

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Amanda Souna CHEM134 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 07/04/2024	Spring 2024. She was super kind and understanding when I explained I had an exam right before the exam for this class; she said I could get a couple minutes extra at the end to compensate if I am late because of my previous exam, but I ended up getting there on time so it wasn't needed. She was great at lecturing, and made lecture summaries that helped explain it during review.
Amanda Souna CHEM484 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/25/2023	Dr. Souna is a great professor! Her labs are hard and she is very meticulous about what goes into lab reports, but she makes it really easy to succeed in her class if you put the time into it. She provides the links for the supplemental readings that you can cite in your lab reports, and she is very helpful in her office hours! She not only makes herself very available, but will help with literally anything if you just ask. I learned a lot from her class and feel that I am very good with scientific writing after taking her classes 483 and 484. She is also extremely receptive to feedback. She set aside time to fill out course evals and wanted us to be honest about which experiments she should keep or get rid of and valued our opinions as students. She also was very understanding about issues with a TA and picked up the slack, even to the point of coming into our lab section and helping with data collection/processing, which not many professors would do. She is all around great professor, and despite how difficult she makes the class, I felt that she made up for it in her availability and helpfulness.
Amanda Souna CHEM134 Expecting a B- b1 12/23/2023	This class sucked, as most people took AP Chem and got a 4 so they had to take this, but I took a Chem 131 class at a local university which was very easy so when I came to this class I had seen barely any of the material. I would still reccomend taking this class rather than Chem 135 even though you need to do some more difficult concepts (deep into acid/base, electrochem, and some orgo), this class is a lot less work than Chem 135. Professor Souna was a pretty good teacher, class was only 50 minutes a week so you kind of teach yourself through the text book to learn most concepts, but the homeworks are not too bad (worth 1/3 of your grade) and she grades pretty leniently with lots of partial credit. Probably the best professor for this class possible as it would be impossible to teach all the concepts within the class time and I think she did a pretty good job of trying to.
Amanda Souna CHEM483 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/22/2023	Souna is one of those people that is clearly very smart, but in my opinion, she is a horrible lecturer. Her lectures felt extremely disorganized and messy, which made writing lab reports difficult because discussing the theory behind the lab was made challenging by her lectures. As a lab instructor, she was great. She was very helpful and involved. But she is honestly one of, if not the only, professors where I could sit through the entire lecture and be completely confused by the end. Grading is on and off for lab reports. I'd say it's pretty light for most of the reports besides the final major report, where they are pretty strict. Overall, the class isn't that bad, but good lord were lectures hard to sit through.
Amanda Souna CHEM134 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/14/2023	Honestly what is going on with this chick. Like does she know that an study guide is supposed too guide your learning for the exam. I am not quite sure if she knows that because 10 percent of the final was based on the study guide, 10 percent was based on the homework and the rest was pulled straight out of knowhere. I busted my butt and doing her long study guide. Furthermore she said 20 percent was based on things learned before the midterm but non of that was on the final. She straight up screwed us over. She told us too studies stuff that wasn't on the final and then was surprised we failed. Her lectures are rushed she doesn't explain things in depth. In addition she doesn't give enough practice for us. Look the class material isnt hard but when you take a teacher that activley misleads you too study the wrong things it becomes a crap show.
Amanda Souna CHEM134 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/07/2023	Great professor and lecturer, CHEM134 has pretty hard subjects but she taught them quite well. Unfortunate that the only class slot (at least for my semester) was at 8am so I ended up not attending too many of the actual lectures... Homework is every 2 weeks, untimed, and is mostly relevant to what is taught in class which is nice. Good professor, would definitely not worry about it when considering taking CHEM134.
Amanda Souna CHEM134 Expecting a B Anonymous 11/30/2023	Being a student in Dr. Souna's class has been an absolute pleasure, and she has easily been my favorite prof this semester. She's very clear and concise in her teaching style and never fails to break stuff down in an easily digestible way. Many people, such as myself, come into this class having done AP Chemistry in high school. Dr. Souna explained stuff in a way that made me completely rethink and better understand the content I learned in AP Chemistry. She's very accommodating and also fair. Great all around!
Amanda Souna CHEM483 Expecting an A Anonymous 07/10/2023	Dr. Souna is very involved in the labs and would frequently come in during labs and TA office hours to check on students. She was very helpful and would give solid recommendations and troubleshooting if you had an issue putting your lab reports together or getting Matlab to run. While this class was definitely easier than 277, this class was still way too difficult for being a 2 credit lab. While it's nice only having two major reports, the smaller data reports can be very time-consuming depending on the lab.She does have weekly lectures but they're not very helpful since she just reads off of the slides that she posts later anyway. Also -- she attaches all sorts of resources for each unit which are very helpful, especially for writing the introduction for major reports. Be prepared to spend a lot of time on lab reports for this class, however, its definitely a do-able class (even alongside chem481).
Amanda Souna CHEM483 Expecting an A Anonymous 06/26/2023	This class was organized and the labs were built on each other. The lab reports were very time consuming, but TAs were very helpful. Dr. Souna also often came in during lab to help out (which most instructors don’t). The rubrics were sometimes vague, but I went to office hours before turning them in and ended with an A on every report. Also, lab reports were 80% of the grade. There was a final exam which was very fair and only 5% of the grade. So if you put in enough time and effort, you will end with an A.
Amanda Souna CHEM483 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/23/2023	The class is well structured and she lays out her expectations pretty clearly. If you go to the TA's and her office hours, they spell out pretty clearly what they want you to include in the reports. The concepts themselves are not too complicated to grasp so long as you attend class and keep up with lecture slides. With that being said, the class is a lot of work and the weekly data reports get really tiresome towards the end. The lab partner you get can also make or break your experience. The major reports are graded quite harshly, but there are a lot of opportunities in general to get a good grade so long as you're willing to commit time and effort. Overall, upper level labs can be a pain, but I believe Dr. Souna ran it as smoothly as it can get.
Amanda Souna CHEM484 Expecting an A florm 05/22/2023	Compared to the 483 lab, Dr. Souna ran 484 almost exactly the same. The biggest difference was that there was no final exam this time! Instead we had to do a presentation with our lab partner about a relevant lab topic, but these were spread out through the semester so some people could get it out of the way early. The first experiment involved familiar stuff in kinetics and fluorescence. The second experiment focused on nanomaterials synthesis, where we could pick from a few options and design our own experiment by varying some part of the protocol. The third experiment involved a bunch of different methods of spectral analysis (IR, Raman, etc.) for vibrational and rotational analysis, and consisted almost entirely of dry labs analyzing provided data and using MATLAB to fit stuff. Conceptually, 484 was not easy (especially if you didn't have a good professor for 482...) but the TAs were a huge help and were really good at explaining everything. Dr. Souna was also really helpful in office hours. Just like in 483, the grading here was super picky but at least this time you're expecting it. Dr. Souna likes things being formatted in a very specific way, and provides clear outlines of everything you need to include in your reports. The only thing that wasn't clear, however, was how much detail she wanted you to go into about certain things. For instance, she'd say in the discussion rubric "briefly mention this principle" and then you'd write a few sentences about how it connects to the lab, but then you'd lose points for not talking about it enough or not mentioning one very specific thing about it. It got pretty annoying. I'm not sure what the averages were on the lab reports since she doesn't make them visible, but I imagine they were typically around an 85-90%.
Amanda Souna CHEM483 Expecting an A florm 12/24/2022	The way 483 is structured was a lot better than any other labs I'd taken previously. There are only 3 different labs, each broken down into several weeks. Data reports were due every week, and major reports were due at the end of the first and third labs. These reports made up 80% of the overall grade, so they're really important to spend a lot of time on. Souna provides extremely clear guidelines for all the tables and figures you need to include in the results section of your reports, but she doesn't make it as clear what you need to write about in your discussion. She'll often mention random concepts or equations in lecture and say "this is worth writing about" so you have to pay attention for things like that. But she also brings up a bunch of useless and overly complicated theories and equations that aren't necessary, so you have to learn how to make judgment calls on what's actually important. Souna can also be pretty nitpicky about formatting and phrasing in reports, but her and the TAs weren't too harsh grading them. The labs themselves were not difficult to perform or understand conceptually (except for getting Matlab to work). Souna often came into lab to check how we were doing and answer questions, which a lot of chem professors rarely do. At the end of the semester, you have to turn in your lab notebook for her to go through and grade. I was expecting an easy hundred from it but she actually checks them thoroughly and was pretty harsh, but it was only 5% of my grade so it didn't really matter. The final exam was also only 5% of the grade so even though it was pretty tough and required a ton of explaining, it had a small overall effect. In general, I'd say Souna ran a surprisingly efficient and well-put together lab that wasn't too difficult, but required a lot of work. She and her TAs always did a good job answering our questions.
Amanda Souna CHEM484 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/18/2022	For those who have already taken 483, 484 is definitely more manageable since you already have report writing experiences.
Amanda Souna CHEM483 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 05/12/2022	Like other students said. No rubrics given or and very little guidance given for reports which she expects very specific things for.
Amanda Souna CHEM483 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/19/2021	Just go to her office hours
Amanda Souna CHEM483 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/09/2021	class was all over the place and there was no guidance to students OR TAs regarding grading. She didn't respond to any of these student concerns, only offered regrades - which would only make her life harder because her rubrics for data reports were so vague that she would have to regrade an entire section's worth of data reports every week. she's not cut out to be a professor, she's quite smart, but she has no connection to students, no care for our questions or concerns, and she certainly doesn't understand how we aren't as smart as her as only undergraduate students. seriously, if you don't have to take this class, don't. if it's required, bother souna about any questions you have or you're going to be putting in hours of work every week to get C's and D's from one TA and A's and B's from souna.
Amanda Souna CHEM483 Expecting an A Anonymous 11/08/2021	class expectations were never clear because TA's grade on a separate rubric even for just the weekly data reports that is not given to students. Class basically had no curve and you can see that less than 5% of students got A's in the distribution. Kind of ridiculous for a class that is conceptually easy. I don't know why she thinks not having any sort of curve or scale is reasonable. She seems to have bizarre ideas of "fairness" that don't really align with reality. I asked for an extension on an assignment about a week due to my circumstances before it was due and she said no due to "fairness." She ought to realize that people have personal circumstances that get rid of her fanciful idea of "fairness"
Amanda Souna CHEM483 Expecting an A Anonymous 04/08/2021	Awesome lecturer, awesome person. Super helpful and responsive. She made CHEM 483 so much manageable. Clear rubrics for the lab reports. Exams were tough though-average was around 50's so she curved a lot.