soooo shes a nice lady, but shes pretty difficult.

i suggest taking another professor if you don't want to get dominated on the final. period.

First off, Gelmini has a really thick accent. It doesn't interfere too much in class, and you get used to it really quickly, but sometimes she's hard to understand because of it.

Other than that, however, Gelmini's a pretty good professor. She covers all of her topics in great detail, and I left her class with a pretty good understanding of all the concepts in the class. The only problem, however, is that while she covers concepts really well, she doesn't do much in the way of examples or practice problems in class, so you definitely need to study and do all of the homework in order to have an idea of what to expect on the tests.

Her tests tend to be kind of hard, but usually fair. You'll never see anything that wasn't covered adequately in lecture. The good thing about her tests is that she's pretty generous with partial credit, so even if you don't get all of the problems right, you'll do okay if you prove that you know the concepts she's testing you on.

The worst parts of her class are the things that are completely out of her control. There was only one TA for my class (poor guy had three or four discussions right in a row to plow through, although since I was in the last one the sections were usually pretty helpful), and we had to do all of our homework online because the Physics Department is too poor to hire a grader for the class. The homework sucks to high heaven, but there's no way around it, so just be sure to do all of the problems, even if you don't get a high percentage on the assignment overall. I got less than 50% on three or four of the homeworks (mostly due to laziness) and managed to get a B+ in the class overall, so you can definitely afford to screw up a bit on the homework.

Overall, Gelmini's a really good professor. Recommended.

Professor Gelmini is great at what she teaches and she knows the subject very well. But in my opinion her lectures are all conceptual. She teaches nothing that will appear on her exams because she does no examples or mathematical physics in class. Also I could not understand what her questions were saying on the exams, so I had to read the question about a million times until I understood. This was bad because the time is not enough for her exams. I don't know but she really lowered my gpa.