Entire grade is one 3 page paper. Made ice cream + cookies and just listened to guest speakers.

If I could say one thing about this class, it's that it's all memorization. I'm not exactly the strongest student in that regard, so I would say this class wasn't hard to understand but rather hard to memorize all the content for. Professor Banerjee is pretty nice, pretty clear in his lectures, and his slides are super detailed, which is good and bad because you should know basically everything on them. His tests weren't very tricky, as he didn't allow cheat sheets or anything, but they were definitely pretty ruthless with testing any aspect of the slides (facts, drawings, graphs, etc.). I personally felt as though the tests were graded relatively harshly, as there's little partial credit and a lot of emphasis on having the exact answer down. (For example, out of a 30 point problem, I had all the right steps but the wrong numbers in the beginning. He gave max 13/30 points, which I felt was a little unfair, but to each their own.) He curved the average to a B (around a 5% curve?), so I guess you could take my experience as that of the average of the class.

This was a class I took for fun (not even for elective) in my senior year, and I thoroughly enjoyed learning about materials science, which core ChemE's don't get a lot of. There was a lot of content, and there's some chemistry, e.g., in polymers and intermolecular bonding, but everything in exams is taken from the slides.

Speaking as a Mechanical Engineering major, this course was not especially difficult, although the course covers a lot of material. I feel that Professor Banerjee was a great lecturer, and I appreciated his energy in teaching this material. Given the nature of the volume of material, each lecture was a solid 2 hours of content, administered through detailed PowerPoint slides. Exams and assignments were quite reasonable, and pulled directly from lecture slides. I enjoyed this course a lot more than I expected, and am very glad that I took Banerjee.

This is a super fun seminar course for entering freshmen in materials science and engineering. In this class you'll be making cookies and ice cream, creating and breaking beams, and listening to (what I thought were) interesting lectures at the end by guest presenters including professors and PhD students. This class was really just a chance to have fun and socialize with other MatSci majors. The entire grade depends on one paper you submit at the end of the quarter. The paper focuses on a topic of the student's choosing relating to materials science, and it cannot exceed three pages (including images and works cited). Do not go try hard on the paper like I did—most people wrote it in no more than two days and got A's.

Prof Banerjee switched up the curriculum a little bit so instead of learning LabView and some other measurement things, you'll primarily work with matlab for ~5 weeks followed by arduino projects for the rest of the quarter. The occasional lectures are pretty decent since the professor is personable and makes them decently relevant to modern applications. Unless you have no experience in coding whatsoever, this class is super easy, and if you like your groupmates, it's pretty fun too

The professor is super flexible with due dates for assignments and is there for almost the entire time alongside the TA, so it's really easy to get help if you need it. There may be a 15-20 min lecture, but after that, you're free to start the homework, so I never ended up thinking about this class outside of the class itself. The homework varies in difficulty but you can get it done pretty quickly if you split up the problems among your groupmates.

This class is an easy A, so if you have any coding experience, it's worth taking. The professor and TA (Hsuan Yu) were extremely helpful and friendly, so it's kind of hard to have a bad time taking this class