Professor
Gilles Peltzer
Most Helpful Review
Spring 2022 - I am going to be honest, I hated this class. For a GE, this class was incredibly tedious and advanced. I am not a STEM major, so maybe that is why this class seemed extra difficult. The lectures were incredibly boring and we rarely finished the slides in class. I will say professor Peltzer is a very sweet looking professor. He clearly knows a lot about earthquakes. However, he is one of those professors that knows so much about his content, that it seems he expects we are just as familiar with the material. Most of which I will bet we have never seen before in school. The slides are posted, but there is no audio/video option I am aware of. That can be troubling since some of his slides are just abstract pictures. The grade breakdown included 1 midterm, 1 final, 7ish labs, 7ish reflections, and an extra credit assignment I believe. The tests were largely memorization based and often queried about random one-off facts that seemed irrelevant. I did finish with an A, but that is only because I am a decent test taker. If you struggle on tests, it will be difficult to feel successful in this class. Definitely not an easy GE.
Spring 2022 - I am going to be honest, I hated this class. For a GE, this class was incredibly tedious and advanced. I am not a STEM major, so maybe that is why this class seemed extra difficult. The lectures were incredibly boring and we rarely finished the slides in class. I will say professor Peltzer is a very sweet looking professor. He clearly knows a lot about earthquakes. However, he is one of those professors that knows so much about his content, that it seems he expects we are just as familiar with the material. Most of which I will bet we have never seen before in school. The slides are posted, but there is no audio/video option I am aware of. That can be troubling since some of his slides are just abstract pictures. The grade breakdown included 1 midterm, 1 final, 7ish labs, 7ish reflections, and an extra credit assignment I believe. The tests were largely memorization based and often queried about random one-off facts that seemed irrelevant. I did finish with an A, but that is only because I am a decent test taker. If you struggle on tests, it will be difficult to feel successful in this class. Definitely not an easy GE.
Most Helpful Review
Being a non-ESS major and having no prior remote sensing experience, a lot of the material went over head and at times I felt like I didn't really know what he was talking about at all. But Professor Peltzer is very good about answering questions in class, in labs, and in his office, and he is very willing to sit down and explain things. His lecture slides are pretty well detailed and the labs are usually explicit in their instructions. His midterm and final are both open notes and open labs. There's also extra credit for each lab (and one extra credit question that went toward the midterm as well), so there's a lot of opportunities to get a pretty good grade. Overall, I felt that I learned a lot from this class and I would recommend taking it.
Being a non-ESS major and having no prior remote sensing experience, a lot of the material went over head and at times I felt like I didn't really know what he was talking about at all. But Professor Peltzer is very good about answering questions in class, in labs, and in his office, and he is very willing to sit down and explain things. His lecture slides are pretty well detailed and the labs are usually explicit in their instructions. His midterm and final are both open notes and open labs. There's also extra credit for each lab (and one extra credit question that went toward the midterm as well), so there's a lot of opportunities to get a pretty good grade. Overall, I felt that I learned a lot from this class and I would recommend taking it.