Goorsky is fucking awesome. He's one of the few teachers to have been recognized as a distinguished teacher and he won the award last year in 2016. Also he let us play with liquid nitrogen after we made ice cream, try finding a teacher that does that.
MSE 104 is an introductory class where you will cover crystallography, mechanical properties, mechanical failure, processing materials, phase diagrams, ceramics, polymers, solid state in the realm of electrical and optical properties, and a little bit of composites and nanotech.
It's a lot of info, but it serves to introduce you to the topics and some key concepts for going forward. He uses an introductory book and complementary slides that come with it, but 80% of the time the slides throw useless formulas that Goorsky doesn't care about, so you'll see him skipping through a lot of the slides (he uploads them online so don't freak out).
On the surface, he can seem incredibly boring because he might appear as though he's reading slides to you and he fumbles around with using powerpoint. So when we got to phase diagrams and the information got a little muddled, lots of people weren't paying attention and those days were kinda dull in class, he even called out students in the back for not paying attention. However, if you want to see the true power of this man, you need to start asking him questions. He knows his shit SO well that he will always give you a satisfying answer to a question, and he always considers it. He'll tell you stories that relate to it and in general when he starts rambling things get very interesting.
I imagine you're taking this class because A) you're a mechanical engineer or B) you're materials engineer/chemistry materials . It really pissed me off to see the Mech E's sleeping in the back of the class not really paying attention nor giving him the respect he deserves. Goorsky is truly fantastic.
He's a bit scary in the start just because he'll ask super obtuse questions, but that's his style which is very different than some other teachers I've had. He'll be the one asking you the questions so you can draw the answer out on your own, which works surprisingly well.
My absolute favorite part of the class are discussion sections (or recitations as he calls it). Here, Goorsky, or the TA will do demonstrations for you. These demonstrations included making ice cream with liquid nitrogen, breaking glass, looking over 3D models for crystal structures etc. People wouldn't go, which is disappointing since they were pretty fun, but more importantly, he had a question on the final that asked about the demos done in discussion, so make sure to attend and pay attention.
My biggest problem with the class though was the pacing, but I think that's just dependent on what year you're taking it. The first week he had a conference so we had one lecture that week, and then he had another big event, so he uploaded online lectures for us to watch, and towards the end when we got to smaller topics he started ending lectures early. It was really awkward and all that dead time could have condensed the class into 6 weeks.
The most work you'll need to do is the homework problem sets, and those only cover computational elements of the test, plus a bit of conceptual stuff you should know.
Basically to succeed, just make sure to engage in the class and pay attention to what he says and pay attention the demos. The tests at the test bank are incredibly similar to the ones he gives you, if not recycled, and in general are pretty easy. His first quiz he made 1/3 of it a group quiz where we worked together to identify crystal structures. The 2nd quiz had a couple application based questions. He curves up, not down, the TA was super nice (at least in the summer I did it).
Sit down, pay attention and have fun. I very much look forward to MSE 110 with him.
