This class is so much work, but I thought it was very worthwhile. Do not take it if you're just looking to satisfy your lab requirement, as you're going to live and breathe optics. If you're genuinely interested in optics, you're going to learn so much and have meaningful projects to put on your resume. The lectures were very long, and I wish Professor Hamilton would give us a 5 to10-minute break halfway through the 2-hour block, but they were helpful background for the labs. Professor Hamilton is very engaged in the actual course and will stop by during your lab just to check in. He is clearly very knowledgeable about the material and wants you to succeed. Your TA definitely makes or breaks this course, and I feel that I got really lucky because Arthur does research in Professor Hamilton's lab. Would definitely take again.

The instructor is nice. He is willing to help students and answer questions. He is a great person, and I would love to take his course again.
The problem is the course content. I would rather die than doing any AMO experiments in my life again. I completely lost interest in AMO. The elective of optics is not offered, so all theory is new to me. I have to learn the theory and the experiments while writing all the reports and pre-labs. All of this takes all my time. All the experiments except the last two take so long, and when I left the labs, it was always mid-night. At least I can say confidently that there is no homeless people on campus in midnight because I was really physically on campus. The experiment s were hard to conduct, and sometimes the TA did the labs for us becuase we spent hours on it and couldn't succeed. For example, in the cavity lab, all the alignments were done by the TA because all our attempts failed miserably. After the labs, we spend so much time writnig reports and answer questions, but the TA grade harshly for some ridiculous reason. After constantly grinding and failing, the hopelessness made me lost hope of life and I started to weep lonely. Another thing to mention is that there is so much information in lecture, and every week after the lecture, my brain is cooked. I don't understand anything from lecture, and I have to self-study. Basically, I self-studied all the theory part, spending days and nights reading lecture notes myself. The instructor did his best, but we have so much material to cover in so little time. This should be a multi-quarter course. I now have a PTSD for lab course. It is completely different from my experience in an actual lab.