After 1 quarter with vvv, I really miss him. Kind and funny man. Always has his arms swinging

Bruinsma is a great lecturer. I have the worst testing anxiety imaginable and scored well below average on both midterms. I thought I was going to fail for sure or end up in the C range but somehow pulled through with a B-!! Always go to his office hours and engage with him during lectures. It is clear that he loves what he does and he loves to help his students. He tries to be thorough and engaging and you will surely look forward to attending his class.

Professor Bruinsma is a very good professor for this class. His lectures are clear and the workload is reasonable. The midterms are also very reasonable, however, they are quite long for the time given. The tests are open book/open note, but this will not help you much. He will curve the exams (midterms and finals) quite generously. There is also a lot of extra credit offered in the midterms and homework. The only issue with the Professor's class is his penmanship, which will take a couple of weeks to get used to. The class starts off slow but will quickly pick up, so do not miss lectures.

Worst two quarters I've ever had. Bruinsma will teach you USELESS facts that you will spend FOREVER on. They will not be on the midterm or the final. They will not be on the GRE and aren't important for your physics career. What's the point of Newtonian mechanics? The point of the class is to learn how physicists transform this into the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian. Spent one week learning a difficult concept, Lagrangian, and he didn't even teach it! He had another prof do it. NEVER ONCE MENTIONED HAMILTONIANS! Oh so I pay 13K to read wikapedia, cool, thanks for the experience.

Midterms were flipping crazy and finals are so dumb. When he does review sessions he will talk FOREVER (2hours) on things in such detail. It's really awesome, but then afterwords he'll say like three other things, not lecture on them or what they are, and that's what will be on the exam.

Also made us do mathematica homework every week! It sucked! It was like having two classes at one time! So 8-10 questions from the book which would take 10 hours if you don't cheat and then 10 hours of mathematica. Super awesome if you have no life and you want to make yourself feel good. No extra credit or anything, such crap.

I'm sure he means well and tries to make it fun, but it doesn't come out that way. Maybe you're into the challenge of learning everything on your own, or reading wikepedia and beating the curve. I just wanted to learn something in class.

So much more I could say about this dude, but I wont. Take him, but yeah, just know that it'll kind of blow.