I despised this class, I would highly advise to avoid taking it with Professor Rajagopal. The content could have been interesting and useful, especially if you are considering going into environmental consulting or related fields. However, the lectures were all over the place. The Professor was flat-out bad at explaining the content and often lost his track of thought. The homeworks were hard and graded harshly, so it sucked not learning anything in the class lectures. I ended up having to go to as many TA office hours as I could to understand the homework. Professor Rajagopal was not approachable or accommodating, and he criticized me several times in lecture which was super uncomfortable. I would not recommend this class.

He means well, but ultimately the lectures felt very disorganized. However, the topic of life cycle assessment itself is, as it seems, a difficult and hand-wavy topic to teach. It's very approximate and requires a lot of different averages and assumptions that don't necessarily reflect real life. A lot of accounting, basically. Professor Rajagopal is really helpful on the homework in office hours, but lecture concepts during lecture were really confusing. He also would change his mind about logistical things like the midterm and final, which was frustrating (like scheduling a final when there was none on the registrar, or changing the allotted time we could take our midterm from 8AM-11:59PM to 8AM-10:15AM).

The class was structured well, with five homeworks at the beginning of the quarter that took about 2-3 hours (or less) each (one per week), and then a group project that the latter half of the quarter focused on. I was blessed with a good group, so this was pretty smooth, but the topic itself wasn't very interesting.

Overall, I wouldn't take this class again.

One of the worst classes I have taken at UCLA. This is for my minor so if you are looking for an engaging environmental class, avoid at all costs. This class requires meticulous detail and tracing lifecycles back to coal production. The homework assignments are frustrating and take hours.