NOTE: I took his AOS 150 class (NOT his 145 class because I had taken it previously), but 150 was not listed for the options.

- If you’re an AOS major and unsure what classes you want to take for the major, I‘d highly recommend this lab class. It was a lot of fun to perform the 3 experiments, and I certainly got a lot of info out of this class that I feel will be helpful toward an atmospheric science career.

- The grade is simply the lab reports for the 3 experiments, which are setting up a met station (taking about 2 weeks’ worth of weather readings and drawing conclusions from the data), measuring CO2 levels on the roof of MS and the amount a plant contributes to our environment, and measuring ozone levels based on incoming solar radiation. These experiments are done in groups and rotated during the class.

- The way this class is structured, there are 2 professors listed (1 to be in the lab while the other is up on the roof of Math Sciences during experiments, or sometimes both to help us students set up experiments on the roof).

- However, from Spring 2012, Professor Stutz was the primary professor (while Professor Lew was the other one on hand), and both were very knowledgeable and helpful throughout the experimental process and with other questions we had related to AOS.

- In particular with Professor Stutz, he simplified what were otherwise very deep topics that led into each lab, as well as being helpful with MatLab by having a couple weeks’ worth of lectures learning and practicing how to take advantage of its capabilities and providing help during the experiments as we needed to create graphs and do calculations for the reports, and finally provide constructive criticism on our lab write-ups so that for each following lab report, they would reflect more towards what you might find in a published scientific article. It will certainly be a memorable experience for you as it was for me.

I had never taken an AOS class before, but 145 had no AOS prereqs and it looked pretty interesting, so I gave it a shot. That said, I thought Dr. Stutz was a great professor. Our class had less than 20 people, and he learned who everyone was, so he knew that I wasn't an AOS major and had never heard of many of the basic concepts covered in the class such as albedo and adiabatic lapse rates. He was always very patient with me and took the time to explain these fundamental concepts to me during discussion section, and I ended up doing very well on the midterm despite not knowing nearly as much about the atmosphere as the other AOS majors in the class.

I would recommend Dr. Stutz. He is very kind and laid back, and often gave us extra time to finish our homework assignments even after the due date passed. His philosophy is to assign difficult homework problems that really make you think hard, but to make up for this his exams are much easier, and he even promises you that the midterm and final will not be nearly as hard as the homework.

The only inconvenient thing about him is that he's always traveling to AOS events and meetings both out of the state and out of the country - it was nice sometimes because he would cancel class, but then that also meant that he was less available to answer our emails or help us if we were having trouble with the homework.

All in all, he's a nice man who actually cares about teaching apart form his research, and I am glad that I took AOS 145 with him.