Professor
Kambiz Shoarinejad
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2021 - First, it is evident that Professor Shoarinejad truly cares. He's passionate about the material, and really wants the students to learn it well. That's not true for all professors, and is a good first step. The lectures were mostly him filling out prewritten notes, which were too numerous to copy down by hand, so either you watched it recorded and pause or have a copy of the unfilled notes on hand. He covered the materially very thoroughly and rigorously, which is good. However, I feel that he did not do a good job of simplifying concepts and making them more digestible. The understandability of explanations he gave was on par with the textbook, which is kinda pointless - why not just read the textbook? He had very nice MATLAB filter plots which he spent lord knows how many hours preparing. He speaks fast and occasion gets a little carried away and becomes a rap god. Homework was the same - fairly thorough and quite long, usually. You do learn the material well, and he includes some practical MATLAB portions, which is nice. I felt it could have been cut down a little. Be prepared to spend at least 8 hours per week on homework. As if the weekly homework is not enough, there are also 3 Python labs. These also take 8 hours or so, but are spread over 2-3 weeks. Honestly, these were my favorite part of the course because they were the most practical and partially guided and very doable (i.e. the code templates were given to you). We took a poll at the beginning of class and we decided on Discord for class discussion. Professor Shoarinejad was online every day from like 6pm to 11pm at least, answering questions. He really tried to be helpful and there is no impediment to you asking questions. He listens to feedback, for example some people weren't happy about the length of the midterm and he let us vote on the time limit for the final (most chose 48 hours lol). Midterm and Final was pretty fair in terms of content, nothing outside of the (very dense) lecture notes was asked. However, as they were take-home, they were very long. Straight up grindy in some parts, like you could spend 20 minutes doing stuff worth 1 point while you question whether you really want to do this or not. (and what the meaning of life is). If you knew your stuff it would take 5-6 hours, but most students spent closer to 12 hours. Overall, Professor Shoarinejad is a good professor, but be warned this course is quite heavy and be prepared to spend lots of time on this. He is a little crazy in his dedication, and he expects you to be too. Take this class if you want to learn DSP deeply and have the time and brain cells to spare.
Spring 2021 - First, it is evident that Professor Shoarinejad truly cares. He's passionate about the material, and really wants the students to learn it well. That's not true for all professors, and is a good first step. The lectures were mostly him filling out prewritten notes, which were too numerous to copy down by hand, so either you watched it recorded and pause or have a copy of the unfilled notes on hand. He covered the materially very thoroughly and rigorously, which is good. However, I feel that he did not do a good job of simplifying concepts and making them more digestible. The understandability of explanations he gave was on par with the textbook, which is kinda pointless - why not just read the textbook? He had very nice MATLAB filter plots which he spent lord knows how many hours preparing. He speaks fast and occasion gets a little carried away and becomes a rap god. Homework was the same - fairly thorough and quite long, usually. You do learn the material well, and he includes some practical MATLAB portions, which is nice. I felt it could have been cut down a little. Be prepared to spend at least 8 hours per week on homework. As if the weekly homework is not enough, there are also 3 Python labs. These also take 8 hours or so, but are spread over 2-3 weeks. Honestly, these were my favorite part of the course because they were the most practical and partially guided and very doable (i.e. the code templates were given to you). We took a poll at the beginning of class and we decided on Discord for class discussion. Professor Shoarinejad was online every day from like 6pm to 11pm at least, answering questions. He really tried to be helpful and there is no impediment to you asking questions. He listens to feedback, for example some people weren't happy about the length of the midterm and he let us vote on the time limit for the final (most chose 48 hours lol). Midterm and Final was pretty fair in terms of content, nothing outside of the (very dense) lecture notes was asked. However, as they were take-home, they were very long. Straight up grindy in some parts, like you could spend 20 minutes doing stuff worth 1 point while you question whether you really want to do this or not. (and what the meaning of life is). If you knew your stuff it would take 5-6 hours, but most students spent closer to 12 hours. Overall, Professor Shoarinejad is a good professor, but be warned this course is quite heavy and be prepared to spend lots of time on this. He is a little crazy in his dedication, and he expects you to be too. Take this class if you want to learn DSP deeply and have the time and brain cells to spare.
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Most Helpful Review
Winter 2021 - The material in 141 it itself pretty cool, and I definitely learned alot from it. However, Shoarinejad’s teaching style just wasn’t for me. He prepares super-detailed notes before every class and just reads through them during lecture. This made his lectures run at ultra fast pace. After a while, I stopped attending lecture and just straight up read the notes. There’s so much material he covers in this class I feel like its a semester class squished into a quarter. The hardest part about his class is the workload. The homework and exam length are absolutely insane. His homework has 5-6 problems, which is normal for an EE class until you find out they have at least e) parts, all the way up to m) parts. It took me more time to do his ultra long HW than to watch the lectures and do the hw and quiz for another EE class. The homework was weekly and we also had a final project which pretty hard and long but kinda cool. His exams tell the same story. He told us it was doable in ~ 3 hours (given 24 hours to finish), but it took me more like 12 hours to do it. The final was even worse, there was 7 questions and one of the questions had a)b)c)d)e)f)g)h)i)j)k)l)m)n) parts. That said, his grading percentages are pretty good (87.5%+ for A, 81.25%+ for A-… etc) so if you really are willing to put in the hours, you can walk out with probably an A- or A (if you work really really hard). So, should you take this class? If you’re a senior, chilling and looking to take just 3 classes or if you’re seriously considering a career in control systems, absolutely, you will learn a shit ton in this class. However, if you’re looking for an elective to take with 3 other major upper-div classes, I would stay the a million miles away as his homework and project will eat up your time and mental health. Deep down, Shoarinejad is a good guy (kinda like a cool dad who uses discord) and he really cares about teaching and preparing us for industry. I just wish he wouldn’t try and fit a semester class into a quarter.
Winter 2021 - The material in 141 it itself pretty cool, and I definitely learned alot from it. However, Shoarinejad’s teaching style just wasn’t for me. He prepares super-detailed notes before every class and just reads through them during lecture. This made his lectures run at ultra fast pace. After a while, I stopped attending lecture and just straight up read the notes. There’s so much material he covers in this class I feel like its a semester class squished into a quarter. The hardest part about his class is the workload. The homework and exam length are absolutely insane. His homework has 5-6 problems, which is normal for an EE class until you find out they have at least e) parts, all the way up to m) parts. It took me more time to do his ultra long HW than to watch the lectures and do the hw and quiz for another EE class. The homework was weekly and we also had a final project which pretty hard and long but kinda cool. His exams tell the same story. He told us it was doable in ~ 3 hours (given 24 hours to finish), but it took me more like 12 hours to do it. The final was even worse, there was 7 questions and one of the questions had a)b)c)d)e)f)g)h)i)j)k)l)m)n) parts. That said, his grading percentages are pretty good (87.5%+ for A, 81.25%+ for A-… etc) so if you really are willing to put in the hours, you can walk out with probably an A- or A (if you work really really hard). So, should you take this class? If you’re a senior, chilling and looking to take just 3 classes or if you’re seriously considering a career in control systems, absolutely, you will learn a shit ton in this class. However, if you’re looking for an elective to take with 3 other major upper-div classes, I would stay the a million miles away as his homework and project will eat up your time and mental health. Deep down, Shoarinejad is a good guy (kinda like a cool dad who uses discord) and he really cares about teaching and preparing us for industry. I just wish he wouldn’t try and fit a semester class into a quarter.
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