Professor
Eleazar Eskin
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Winter 2026 - I want to preface this by saying I've never written a Bruinwalk review before. That is how negatively I view this course - and I haven't even taken the final yet. If you don't have to take this course, DO NOT TAKE IT. I'm writing this review ASAP so I don't forget about it once I'm out of this course, as I never want to think about it ever again. I know once that final hits, I won't want to look back. First and foremost, the projects. The projects are INSANELY long and quite difficult. There is no hand-holding; you are ON YOUR OWN. There is some "guidance" but realistically you will be spending 10+ hours on each project, all things considered. Like another reviewer said, even the setup had no explanation. Just starting the projects felt like a massive scavenger hunt. Be ready to dedicate entire days to just the projects alone. They are in a "Part A", "Part B" structure, where each week you get part A, then the next week part B of that project. Part B is typically slightly easier than part A. Following that, you get an entirely new project to start from scratch - completely unrelated! The only "plus-side" to this (if you could call it that) is you get a 48-hour extension on any project, no questions asked, just by filling out their project extension form. You can use this for each project, so in theory, projects each have a two day extension attached. But this doesn't really help when you're getting projects weekly anyway. Having taken the midterm, I can say it was moderately difficult with a 70% median, and deviated pretty significantly from the practice. Extremely long - I worked until the very last minute. There were certainly some curveballs. I got baited by a previous Bruinwalk review that said the midterm was just like the practice exam. I'm not sure if that was the case before, but it CERTAINLY is not the case this time around. The practice was 4 pages long, with the actual midterm being 20 PAGES. Speaking of lectures, the first half of the course was quite alright (Eskin), but the second half's lecturer was subpar (Ernst). Eskin was moderately engaging and I actually managed to follow his lectures. Ernst on the other hand, simply cannot lecture. Whenever he walked up there, it seemed like he read directly off the slides. I opted to watch the recordings instead of attend in-person lecture as it was a massive waste of time. That's a plus though - the lectures for this course were recorded. However, they only posted lectures for a given day once the next lecture had already occurred. For example, lectures were on Tues/Thurs. If you missed Tuesday, you would have to wait until Thursday to see Tuesday's lecture - and then wait until next Tuesday to get that Thursday recording. The homework is essentially a bunch of leetcode problems, with some of them being comically easy, and others being extremely time-consuming - almost project-tier. There were 7 of them, so you can imagine how that piles up on top of the crazy weekly projects. TL;DR: Project-heavy, long and tedious exams, recorded lectures (delayed), heavy workload. Just a difficult course overall that does not feel rewarding to take.
Winter 2026 - I want to preface this by saying I've never written a Bruinwalk review before. That is how negatively I view this course - and I haven't even taken the final yet. If you don't have to take this course, DO NOT TAKE IT. I'm writing this review ASAP so I don't forget about it once I'm out of this course, as I never want to think about it ever again. I know once that final hits, I won't want to look back. First and foremost, the projects. The projects are INSANELY long and quite difficult. There is no hand-holding; you are ON YOUR OWN. There is some "guidance" but realistically you will be spending 10+ hours on each project, all things considered. Like another reviewer said, even the setup had no explanation. Just starting the projects felt like a massive scavenger hunt. Be ready to dedicate entire days to just the projects alone. They are in a "Part A", "Part B" structure, where each week you get part A, then the next week part B of that project. Part B is typically slightly easier than part A. Following that, you get an entirely new project to start from scratch - completely unrelated! The only "plus-side" to this (if you could call it that) is you get a 48-hour extension on any project, no questions asked, just by filling out their project extension form. You can use this for each project, so in theory, projects each have a two day extension attached. But this doesn't really help when you're getting projects weekly anyway. Having taken the midterm, I can say it was moderately difficult with a 70% median, and deviated pretty significantly from the practice. Extremely long - I worked until the very last minute. There were certainly some curveballs. I got baited by a previous Bruinwalk review that said the midterm was just like the practice exam. I'm not sure if that was the case before, but it CERTAINLY is not the case this time around. The practice was 4 pages long, with the actual midterm being 20 PAGES. Speaking of lectures, the first half of the course was quite alright (Eskin), but the second half's lecturer was subpar (Ernst). Eskin was moderately engaging and I actually managed to follow his lectures. Ernst on the other hand, simply cannot lecture. Whenever he walked up there, it seemed like he read directly off the slides. I opted to watch the recordings instead of attend in-person lecture as it was a massive waste of time. That's a plus though - the lectures for this course were recorded. However, they only posted lectures for a given day once the next lecture had already occurred. For example, lectures were on Tues/Thurs. If you missed Tuesday, you would have to wait until Thursday to see Tuesday's lecture - and then wait until next Tuesday to get that Thursday recording. The homework is essentially a bunch of leetcode problems, with some of them being comically easy, and others being extremely time-consuming - almost project-tier. There were 7 of them, so you can imagine how that piles up on top of the crazy weekly projects. TL;DR: Project-heavy, long and tedious exams, recorded lectures (delayed), heavy workload. Just a difficult course overall that does not feel rewarding to take.
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Spring 2023 - *grabs you personally by the throat* SAVE YOUR SOUL. DO NOT TAKE THIS COURSE. Unless you want to do 4 projects that have very little guidance in the specs, each split into 2 parts that require different types of outputs, on top of doing 7 homeworks, each with 4-10 Leetcode-like coding problems evaluated on a shitty $80 online textbook website (Stepik) where you have to download the input to your computer, run the code, and upload the outputs and pray that you matched the formatting exactly, otherwise repeat the process. (Also, I get Stepik advertising emails in Russian, which 1) I did not sign up for 2) I don't know Russian.) And about those projects, they decided to try something new this quarter: making us upload our results to a bioinformatics leaderboard website. The fun thing is that 1) They don't post the leaderboard until 2-3 days before the project is due. 2) Someone has to manually approve that you can join the leaderboard. Which means you wait for some poor TA to handle your request. 3) They don't post the grading thresholds WITH the project spec or even when they post the leaderboards sometimes, so if you finish your code early, you have to wait for the announcement of the threshold. If you don't pass it? Guess you're working on the project again! I have never taken a class with this many Canvas announcements about project extensions and grading thresholds and about homework problems becoming Extra Credit because very few people are successfully solving it. And have I mentioned that they also made us read 4 papers and ask and answer other students' questions about it? To me, it felt like the blind leading the blind. The only saving grace of this course is that the midterm was reasonable. If you read and understand the textbook and the slides (which is what I did because their lecturing is Pretty Bad, especially Ernst's), you can do the problems. They just make you apply the techniques to the given data. They also gave a set of practice problems that matched pretty closely. I'm writing this review before the final though, so maybe they decide to completely switch it up on us. (But, I'm skimming the final practice problems, it seems like it's the same problem format.) Who knows. Maybe you'll enjoy the torture more than I did. Maybe you're that kid who was already working on a bioinformatics library for their research and used it for Project 1, landing you a score in the top 3, at which point you're obligated to do a presentation of your solution to the class. The class is mostly empty, by the way. Just like how this class made me feel. Grade breakdown for Spring 2023: Projects 25%. Homeworks 20%. Midterm Exam 25%. Final Exam 25%. Paper/Guest Speaker Question and Responses 5%.
Spring 2023 - *grabs you personally by the throat* SAVE YOUR SOUL. DO NOT TAKE THIS COURSE. Unless you want to do 4 projects that have very little guidance in the specs, each split into 2 parts that require different types of outputs, on top of doing 7 homeworks, each with 4-10 Leetcode-like coding problems evaluated on a shitty $80 online textbook website (Stepik) where you have to download the input to your computer, run the code, and upload the outputs and pray that you matched the formatting exactly, otherwise repeat the process. (Also, I get Stepik advertising emails in Russian, which 1) I did not sign up for 2) I don't know Russian.) And about those projects, they decided to try something new this quarter: making us upload our results to a bioinformatics leaderboard website. The fun thing is that 1) They don't post the leaderboard until 2-3 days before the project is due. 2) Someone has to manually approve that you can join the leaderboard. Which means you wait for some poor TA to handle your request. 3) They don't post the grading thresholds WITH the project spec or even when they post the leaderboards sometimes, so if you finish your code early, you have to wait for the announcement of the threshold. If you don't pass it? Guess you're working on the project again! I have never taken a class with this many Canvas announcements about project extensions and grading thresholds and about homework problems becoming Extra Credit because very few people are successfully solving it. And have I mentioned that they also made us read 4 papers and ask and answer other students' questions about it? To me, it felt like the blind leading the blind. The only saving grace of this course is that the midterm was reasonable. If you read and understand the textbook and the slides (which is what I did because their lecturing is Pretty Bad, especially Ernst's), you can do the problems. They just make you apply the techniques to the given data. They also gave a set of practice problems that matched pretty closely. I'm writing this review before the final though, so maybe they decide to completely switch it up on us. (But, I'm skimming the final practice problems, it seems like it's the same problem format.) Who knows. Maybe you'll enjoy the torture more than I did. Maybe you're that kid who was already working on a bioinformatics library for their research and used it for Project 1, landing you a score in the top 3, at which point you're obligated to do a presentation of your solution to the class. The class is mostly empty, by the way. Just like how this class made me feel. Grade breakdown for Spring 2023: Projects 25%. Homeworks 20%. Midterm Exam 25%. Final Exam 25%. Paper/Guest Speaker Question and Responses 5%.
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Spring 2020 - This class is as easy or difficult as you would like it to be. Although most people who took CS32 and did reasonably OK would get a good grade in this class, I would suggest taking it only if you are interested in exploring bioinformatics and not just for a good grade.
Spring 2020 - This class is as easy or difficult as you would like it to be. Although most people who took CS32 and did reasonably OK would get a good grade in this class, I would suggest taking it only if you are interested in exploring bioinformatics and not just for a good grade.
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CS CM124 Winter 2013 Prof is a nice guy... really relaxed and if you need help just go to him or the TA. The class isn't too demanding, but if you want to work more on the final project you can always make it more challenging for yourself. HW/MT/Final are just there to show you kinda whats going on.. the TA helps you through all of them during discussions. And by helps you through them i mean walks you through the problems, and solutions. Lectures/Discussions are all filmed and posted, which is nice. Final Project: For this quarter, he gave us a list of projects to pick from, and corresponding difficulty levels. If you dont have much time or dont really feel like you know whats going on, just pick an easy one... and if you get the hang of it you can add more to the project to challenge yourself. The project is the majority of the grade, i believe. For future classes he said he might mix it up, but probably similar stuff (pick your own language to code in, etc). There is a presentation for the project at the end of the quarter. 10 min of explain what you did. Not coding details.. just the big picture and your results like accuracy and run time. Kinda strange.. but you vote on your classmates via text. Not sure if this actually affects the grade, but you get participation for doing it. Interesting peak into a different side of CS.. i'd recommend the class. Not hard, good prof, not too stressful... and you learn along the way.
CS CM124 Winter 2013 Prof is a nice guy... really relaxed and if you need help just go to him or the TA. The class isn't too demanding, but if you want to work more on the final project you can always make it more challenging for yourself. HW/MT/Final are just there to show you kinda whats going on.. the TA helps you through all of them during discussions. And by helps you through them i mean walks you through the problems, and solutions. Lectures/Discussions are all filmed and posted, which is nice. Final Project: For this quarter, he gave us a list of projects to pick from, and corresponding difficulty levels. If you dont have much time or dont really feel like you know whats going on, just pick an easy one... and if you get the hang of it you can add more to the project to challenge yourself. The project is the majority of the grade, i believe. For future classes he said he might mix it up, but probably similar stuff (pick your own language to code in, etc). There is a presentation for the project at the end of the quarter. 10 min of explain what you did. Not coding details.. just the big picture and your results like accuracy and run time. Kinda strange.. but you vote on your classmates via text. Not sure if this actually affects the grade, but you get participation for doing it. Interesting peak into a different side of CS.. i'd recommend the class. Not hard, good prof, not too stressful... and you learn along the way.
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Fall 2023 - Standard seminar class that's required for any CASB major/minor. Show up, take some brief notes, and write a review for each talk. The review is just a summary of the talk, the most recent developments, what you didn't understand, and feedback. Some of the talks were actually really cool and prompted several students to join the researchers' labs (my favorites were Neuroimaging Informatics, AI in Medicine, and Genetic & Phenotypic Psychiatry), but expect them to change year by year. If you're already in a lab and like the research you're doing, it's pretty boring, but there's practically no workload - if you sit at the back of the lecture hall, you will see a bunch of people doing homework, solving the NYT crossword, playing snake, or chatting while taking notes lol The slightly annoying part was trying to summarize a boring talk that didn't make any sense, since some researchers assume that undergrads have a working knowledge of a bunch of statistics and ML stuff from the stats 100 or 101 series. But, even if you have a big-picture understanding and can at least name the methods they used without explaining then you're fine. Also I kinda hate genetics and like 70% of them were about it so that was also pretty annoying.
Fall 2023 - Standard seminar class that's required for any CASB major/minor. Show up, take some brief notes, and write a review for each talk. The review is just a summary of the talk, the most recent developments, what you didn't understand, and feedback. Some of the talks were actually really cool and prompted several students to join the researchers' labs (my favorites were Neuroimaging Informatics, AI in Medicine, and Genetic & Phenotypic Psychiatry), but expect them to change year by year. If you're already in a lab and like the research you're doing, it's pretty boring, but there's practically no workload - if you sit at the back of the lecture hall, you will see a bunch of people doing homework, solving the NYT crossword, playing snake, or chatting while taking notes lol The slightly annoying part was trying to summarize a boring talk that didn't make any sense, since some researchers assume that undergrads have a working knowledge of a bunch of statistics and ML stuff from the stats 100 or 101 series. But, even if you have a big-picture understanding and can at least name the methods they used without explaining then you're fine. Also I kinda hate genetics and like 70% of them were about it so that was also pretty annoying.
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