Professor Spokoyny is one of the best professors I met at UCLA. During his CHEM 174 class, I learned how to be a part of a group to work on a research project. I also learned from professor Spokoyny about how to think like a real chemist and approach sophisticated questions in a straightforward way. Although the research project was not easy for me to understand at the beginning, professor and three TAs were always willing to answer my questions during and after class. We were taught to write scientific papers in ACS style and professor helped us one by one on improving the quality of the papers. We were also provided the opportunity to learn a number of lab techniques such as glovebox and Schlenk line.
I highly recommend this class to any student who want to pursue an advanced degree in chemistry or who want to work in a lab after graduation, because it can teach you many knowledge and skills to help you get well prepared for your future study and career in chemistry.

I throughly enjoyed the 'hands-on' and applicability of this class; I feel it prepared me and gave me confidence in my laboratory techniques as well as giving me a real taste of how gritty the life of unexpected failures and successes that day-in and day-out lab work can be. I felt that our class project was engaging and that we were able to actually investigate and carve out a very tiny piece of new knowledge. The TA's were very helpful even if this work was sometimes (or mostly) boring for them (they might have just been exhausted). Alex is very approachable, helpful, and is hard on you when you're not giving your best (as he rightfully should be). This class gave me the ability to reflect on my own failings and how I could do better. Take it, if you're willing to put in the work, you won't regret it.

Probably one of the most unique classes I took at UCLA as an Econ major. I loved Prof. Alex's teaching style - he's a super chill guy, very funny, made use of cool demonstrations and media to supplement the material, and the book for the class was an interesting read. His slides don't have that much writing on them, but as long as you attend class you should be fine, the exams are easy and he clearly emphasizes what to focus on for the exams, as well as reviewing the previous lecture's main points at the start of the next class. He also brought in a guest lecturer who was an expert in his field (Explosives) for a very engaging lecture.

I really enjoyed this class. I’m a Spanish Major and just took this class because I needed extra units. The class consists of a midterm, a final, and a Wikipedia project. It’s not an extremely difficult course but you need to pay attention in class because there is no text book or extra materials, so the exams are based off of what he says in lecture. He provides a print-out of the PowerPoint so you can take notes. He also replaces the midterm with the final if you did not do too well, which is nice. He’s really passionate about his work and he makes classes interactive. He also requires you to attend office hours to elaborate on the Wikipedia project, which was helpful. I learned a lot of interesting facts throughout the course. He mostly cares that his students learn. He doesn’t make his exams hard, he just wants to make sure that you are learning the concepts of the course. I think this is probably one of my favorite class I’ve taken at UCLA, coming from a north campus major.

This was one of my favorite classes at UCLA. Professor Spokoyny (Prefers to be called Alex) was super nice and extremely knowledgeable. The class material itself was very interesting and very important to know. There was one midterm, one final, and a twitter assignment. Class is fairly easy if you pay attention. He even prints out the slides for you! Attendance is also taken so make sure to go to class. I would highly recommend this class!

Since enrolling in this course as a freshman in Fall Quarter, it's still one of my favorite classes I've taken to date.

In terms of workload, there is not much required work outside of class -- we had one midterm, one final, a Wikipedia project, and an outside reading (not a textbook, though it was said the final would test some knowledge from the book). I found the book, Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik, to be very interesting and digestible for people of all majors; I've even recommended it to a couple of friends. The Wikipedia project was a group assignment, where you researched a prominent scientist who didn't have a Wikipedia page yet and wrote/designed one for them. For instance, our assigned scientist, Tehshik Yoon, is still active in his research and has a life story and accomplishments that would only be found on UW-Madison and publication websites without Wikipedia.

Professor Spokoyny (prefers to be called Alex) allowed us full-page cheat sheets for both the midterm and the final. Thus, even though the class covers a wide variety of topics and examples that may be hard to recall in full, the cheat sheets can be used as a reference to jog one's memory. The material itself (pun unintended) is very understandable, and Alex presents it in an engaging way when he lectures (full disclosure: I am a STEM major, though I hadn't taken any classes at UCLA yet). He uses a lot of real-world examples, often delving into historical events and analyzing society as a whole in order to convey a concept. We also had some cool demos in class every week that we could play around with. I remember his tests being very doable if one pays attention in lecture (attendance counts, by the way) and the averages being quite high. He's more invested in making sure you understand the course material than in making the tests difficult.

Lastly, Alex and his TA were very open to helping the students and spending extra time with us to make sure we understood the material and were on track with our assignment. The office hours setting was very casual, and you could ask about anything you wanted to, really. This class is smaller than many GE's; when I took it there were around 30 students. It made it much easier to interact with the professor and TA, to ask questions, and to be engaged during lecture.

Overall, I think this is a great class to consider if you have extra units to fulfill or need a physical science GE. It's very laid-back, but you do need to pay attention in lectures and do some practice problems to exceed on the tests. The material is delivered so that it's understandable for students of all majors, and the professor is very open to helping you through it. I'd say the topics were pretty engaging, ranging from empty space to food storage methods to colors. If you get the chance to, I'd say take it!

I really enjoyed taking this course with Alex! Alex is an engaging lecturer and the course is super relatable to our everyday life! Also, the cheatsheet makes exams easy - memorization is not required.

Strongly recommend!!!

One of my favorite classes I have ever taken. The information you learn in this class is useful no matter which major you are. It is not difficult to understand and it changes the way you view the world. If you are at all interested in product design, economics, or anything to do with materials, this class is perfect. I cannot recommend this more as an easy GE that is interesting.

I believe Alex is a phenomenal teacher who wants to help impart his passion for the course content onto the students, but I don't believe he was effective in doing that. Despite the fact that he does cool experiments during class and puts effort into making the content digestible, lot of people I talked to in the course were not that engaged in the material. I think it is due to the fact that the course was too lecture-heavy and there was not enough room for discussion to unpack these topics. It was their first year doing a lab for this course and it was way less interesting than the lectures. I wish that Alex could be a little bit more interactive with the students and share a dialogue with the students, rather than just default to his scripted lecture jokes. His prefernce for select subject matters and bias on science's relationship with market capitalism is also a hindrance on direct learning of the material world. The class should be more aptly named, "Alex's Thoughts on the Material World." That being said, he is always open to a chat during Office Hours and is in general a pretty relaxed guy. It's really fun as a humanities major to actually learn science in a 1 on 1 conversation from someone who is so heavily involved in the science world (he runs a lab developing neutron-based cancer treatments and therapies). It's not a bad class in the slightest, you will learn a lot from it, and you won't have to worry too much about your grade, but I was let-down given all the hype that is on this BruinWalk page. Shout-out to the TA, Qiao Qiao Wang, she's really chill and has good energy.

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