Waste of time. Horrible uncaring professor and even worse TA Jesse Cha.

This is not an engineering class but a writing class which purpose is to do a free research for the institute run by prof. Random grading by rude TA Jesse who is not qualified for the job of grading papers. Professor does not like questions, gets upset with emails, does not want any communication from students. Old slides with oudated information and Wikipedia-borrowed graphics and info. Beware of this class - a lot of frustration and uncertainity with grades that are based on writing but evaluated by the unqualified graders.

This class is about your writing skills and paper organization more than an engineering, but even so, the writing is evaluated by engineering students-graders who likely have no expertise in writing and likely not even qualified to teach writing at college level or teach college English courses in general. Grading is arbitrary, capricious, unskilled, and the scores do not reflect engineering knowledge in this class. One has the same chance to get a decent grade as playing a roulette. Emails to professor are also unwelcome. This class seems to be a solicitation of research and research ideas.

Never have I write a review on bruinwalk, but I feel like I have to for this class. This is the worst class I have taken in UCLA. First of all, you won't learn anything from this class, you can watch a whole quater worth of information in 1 youtube video. The professor goes over the same material taught in week 1-2 thoughout the quater, and invite guess speaker to teach. He also cut the guess speaker short so that he can leave 1 hour early. This is understandable when you realise that this class is for the professor to gain man power to do research for him. The research cover the whole 10 weeks. Each week has a 1 vague sentence prompt that you have to complete. However, the grading is very specific, which make you wonder why the grading critiria is not in the prompt itself. To put to perspective, it is like the professor said he is hungry, and you are task to bring him food. But once you deliver the food, he take off point because its not the vegan decaf tuna sushi that he wanted. Each week also have 3 HW assignment, 1 for theorectical, 1 for lecture ,and 1 for the research project, all albritary grading btw. You will thank me later for not taking this class. However, if you wanna do a russian roulette hoping to get an A and waste 10 week of your lifespan, feel free to do so. (Engineering knowledge are not required)

I am disappointed and embarrassed by the quality of this class. This is not UCLA standard. SHAME !!!!

Here are the reasons:

1. In summary the class is just a research class where the prof make his student to research for his lab because no one want to join his lab.

2. Doesn't not teach you anything at all. Many youtuber do a better job at explaining and teaching smart grid than this clown of a professor.

3. Prompt for homework are vague but the grading is very harsh and it's like a roulette. Unless you get lucky and answer them the specific way he want (highly unlikely because he doesn't tell you what he wanted).

4. TA (Amir) is as useful as a Solar-power flashlight..... No communication with the prof at all.

5. Grading are very slow but the assignment rate are rapid (3 hw every week + project). Only revived the grade 3 week after submission (9 assignment was submitted until the first one was graded). The project assignment build on each other so if you get the first one wrong then you are F*CKed for the rest of the quarter.

DO YOURSELF A FAVOR AND JUST SAY "NO" for this class. There are plenty other class where the prof actually care and want you to learn.

Some good thing (only 1):

1. The guess lecturer, which he bring in every week since he is too lazy to teach, was exceptional. And of course he had to cut them 1 hour short every time since he wanted to be somewhere else.