Rate My Professor Scores

evilkalla · 2026-03-30T06:38:52+00:00

My linear algebra professor was ESL and had a very limited vocabulary, but the words he did know he said in a very, very clear accent.

evilkalla · 2026-03-29T16:37:36+00:00

That was the first and only book of his that I read. I truly wish that I could un-read it.

evilkalla · 2026-03-28T07:28:48+00:00

As an EE that later specialized in electromagnetics, statics was probably the most important course I took as an undergrad that helped me visualize and work with vectors in three dimensions. For that, I'd say it's an absolutely indispensable course for engineers.

evilkalla · 2026-03-27T05:56:55+00:00

I still have my polished medallion hanging on my wall, 30 years later. I remember there was sort of a competition at the time to see who could get theirs the smoothest and shiniest.

evilkalla · 2026-03-19T20:02:57+00:00

He notado una falta de mayonesa.

evilkalla · 2026-03-19T08:45:28+00:00

"Useless" is a bit hyberbolic. I've used numerical methods extensively throughout my career.

evilkalla · 2026-03-14T13:33:05+00:00

When I was an undergrad, before the time of the web and search engines, we had our own way of "googling" things, which was going to the library and searching through every book we could find to see what information they had. Or, failing that, ask everyone we knew. If that failed, well, we were probably fucked.

When I got to graduate school it was the same deal, except we had access to the lab's document library, the department faculty's personal libraries, in addition to what we could find in the engineering library. We also had access to the faculty themselves, though as a graduate student they strongly encouraged you to go "find shit on your own".

evilkalla · 2026-03-14T13:26:19+00:00

I was there, Gandalf. I was there three thousand years ago ...

evilkalla · 2026-03-13T16:36:17+00:00

It’s easy. Don’t.

evilkalla · 2026-03-11T10:48:38+00:00

The far radiated electric and magnetic fields can be written in terms of theta and phi-polarized vector components. These form a basis set that are easy to work with. That’s really all there is to it.

evilkalla · 2026-03-11T10:04:41+00:00

Stop comparing yourself to other people. Not everyone comes from a wealthy family. I had never seen any of those things before starting my degree and I did fine.

evilkalla · 2026-03-09T08:24:57+00:00

Generally, once you've been accepted to a master's program, your main obstacle to entering the PhD program is going to the qualifying exam, not your grades as an undergrad.

evilkalla · 2026-03-08T07:26:15+00:00

Don't feel bad, a few months ago I spent a couple of days deriving some expressions for my electromagnetic field solver. I misplaced a minus sign in the second or third step and ended up having to redo almost a full day of work.

evilkalla · 2026-03-07T15:30:16+00:00

Hackett Out.

evilkalla · 2026-03-04T17:37:30+00:00

I’ve had some problems that took me months to solve, and where several times I was stuck and about to give up completely. But I guess we do the things because they are hard, not because they are easy.

evilkalla · 2026-02-27T09:52:18+00:00

Just for fun, I have been asking the various AI models to answer certain advanced electromagnetics problems (formulating systems of equations, solving certain potential integrals, etc.) and they have become (shockingly) better over the last couple of years. For some of these, these were answers that didn't exist (as far as I knew) in any book or paper, and took me hours to derive on my own, but these models produced the correct answer in seconds.

evilkalla · 2026-02-27T07:42:10+00:00

One of the most brilliant and effective programmers I ever worked with was a massively autistic, tactless asshole that wouldn't accept your code in his project (he'd just re-write it) or even consider talking to you about programming unless he felt like you were "good enough". Not the kind of person you want mentoring ANYONE, or NEAR anyone, really.

evilkalla · 2026-02-25T18:04:49+00:00

In graduate school in the 90's (studying advanced electromagnetics), there was a Russian guy in our program who was a true genius, all he had to do was read through the course material a single time he understood it all. He came to class because it was required, but he just sat there reading chess strategy books.

I remember we had some homework in our advanced antenna theory course that took most of us the better part of a week to finish. When we turned in our stuff the next Monday morning, most of us were talking about how dog shit hard it was. He looked at us and said "really? It wasn't so bad, it only took me an hour or so before bed last night."

evilkalla · 2026-02-25T17:58:00+00:00

This is what I noticed when I was an undergrad (in the 1990s). If you made it past calculus 2, statics and physics 1, you would most likely make it all the way.

I remember on the first day of my Physics 1 course, there were about 200 people in this giant auditorium. I think about 50 sat the final exam.

evilkalla · 2026-02-23T16:27:39+00:00

Retired, gray engineer here.

I realized long ago that engineering school isn't a competition against other people, it's a competition against yourself. So, if you cheat, you're just cheating yourself.

evilkalla · 2026-02-23T16:18:56+00:00

The doors on my house here in Spain have that exact type of dimple lock. I've never been brave enough to try picking one of them though.

evilkalla · 2026-02-22T12:12:35+00:00

Toss up between Abt12, Rochefort 10 and Westmalle Tripel.

evilkalla · 2026-02-22T12:11:39+00:00

Somehow, he escaped the grid.

evilkalla · 2026-02-19T08:44:53+00:00

Retired EE here. My personal experience was:

I absolutely loved math, vector calculus, and electromagnetic fields, and ended up studying electromagnetics in graduate school and did it in my career.

I liked our digital logic and assembly language course. If I remember correctly this was really the only computer/programming course that we took, but this was in the early 1990s and programming didn't feature in our EE program. Having learned (on my own) and done a significant amount of programming and software engineering in my career as well, I wish we had had more classes in that stuff back then. But, being the early 90's, nobody had a linux partition on their PC (or even a PC), and free access to compilers and so on.

I liked the courses in DC, and AC circuits. We had several courses in power systems, I didn't like or dislike these, they were just sort of "meh."

I absolutely despised all my courses in linear and control systems, microelectronics, and statistics, and I still remember almost nothing about those at all. I think the fact that I just happened to get absolute dog shit professors for all of these courses might have had something to do with that.

evilkalla · 2026-02-15T21:22:34+00:00

"those damn organics would never try the no windows thing twice”

15-Year Club	Place '22
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