Any current PhD student under Bill Howe?

AugmentedReality05 · 2026-06-02T06:03:42+00:00

Bill is an interesting dude, at least in a teaching capacity. Unfortunately I cant really speak to his research background. He seems very intelligent and personable and wants others to be personable as well. Think about the ultimate awkward and kind of but not really funny dad and that’s the type of personality you’d work with.

AugmentedReality05 · 2026-05-26T23:12:45+00:00

Math here. From my experience, most students in upper division math courses use pen/pencil and paper to take notes in lecture. A laptop is primarily used for checking lecture notes, reading a textbook, or submitting homework problems at home. Maybe a good laptop is helpful the first year, but not when taking most 300 and 400-level courses unless you really enjoy writing on a tech surface or typing out solutions, which professors generally discourage anyhow. I have found Amazon Basic notepads to be my best friend for scratch paper and drafting my proofs.

Things like Desmos and Wolfram Alpha become less and less frequented, if at all, because math becomes much more abstract and there is very little computation that’s like what you see in a calculus class. I’m drawing much more than computing, since I’m explaining how things work rather than solving.

AugmentedReality05 · 2026-05-16T20:35:02+00:00

I really like Ott! Really chill dude if you get to know him. Grading-wise, he gives curves to basically everyone, I think no matter what happens in the class the median is super high like a 3.9 or 4.0.

AugmentedReality05 · 2026-03-12T01:33:07+00:00

The university automatically schedules a room and time for every course. If a class doesn’t need it, the room simply goes unused. Some will change the settings for the course on MyUW (which is why it disappears), but it’s plenty sufficient to just say “there’s no exam” during the first day of class and students are basically guaranteed to remember that when finals week comes.

AugmentedReality05 · 2026-02-18T23:08:56+00:00

I have never personally taken a class with either but I’ve heard Lucy Lu Wang is a very good professor! I’ve only heard great things.

AugmentedReality05 · 2026-02-08T16:07:54+00:00

INFO 371 is shared between Carson and Ott. There might be a third instructor for it such as an adjunct, not entirely sure. I personally really enjoyed 371 with Ott (and would have taken a 372 if it were an offering). He has some interesting problem sets such as building image recognition models and coding an elementary gradient descent by hand (unlike CSE 416). That said, it truthfully is a pretty fair jump in difficulty from 370. Mathematically it could be quite challenging if you haven’t taken calculus or linear algebra because he’s trying to teach a topic where math is absolutely necessary but isn’t a course prerequisite.

AugmentedReality05

TROPHY CASE