While I very much enjoyed this class it felt a bit weird with 5/7 of the students working towards a PhD in photonics. I absolutely loved my PhD partner (nothing but nice things to say about them), but it felt nearly impossible to contribute in a meaningful way. Obviously, they will want to do every assignment to the best of their ability, but my personal ability was much less than theirs in this specific field. This isn't for a lack of trying on my part, I went out of my way to be helpful, but it simply isn't that easy when I am partnered with someone who is working in a photonics lab on a near daily basis. Either way, they were incredibly understanding of this and made sure I understood everything.

My recommendation for the professor is to ensure that roles are well-defined in mismatched groups beforehand. I can't imagine how painful this class would have been if I was partnered with a less understanding PhD partner.

Also, I felt the expectations for the review paper could have been explained better. Writing a review paper wouldn't have been bad, but we were told that we need to relate it to the MATLAB mode-locked laser simulation code in some way. In my opinion, the paper and code didn't have a direct relationship, so this was easier said than done (for me at least, probably was a cakewalk for the grad students). I recommend requiring a rough draft for this paper and possibly spending one day in class on it as the other student review said.

Final Thoughts:
While I do have some minor critiques, I would still recommend this class to anyone who enjoyed the format of 170A. It's entirely possible to get a good grade, but you will have to work for it!

This class was interesting, and I think it was valuable to help me get a more realistic idea of what practical photonics design might look like. I think the assignments and Final Design Project were great opportunities to tackle some design problems, and each one was incrementally more difficult than the last. The Final Paper Review I feel was just a sort of after-thought assignment, as it wasn't really well discussed in class beyond maybe reminders to do it and feedback if you had the opportunity to work on it weeks before its due date. I think it would have been helpful to maybe dedicate part of one class to help familiarize the students with fundamental concepts used in the paper, that I as an undergraduate taking the course had never encountered before.

Which perfectly transitions to what I think this course could most improve on. For background, I am a 3rd year undergraduate, and I was under the assumption from the registrar and course listings pages from the engineering department that this was an undergraduate upper division electrical engineering class. Yet the class was majority graduate students. I felt extremely behind compared to all the graduate students either having worked or currently working in the photonics field. It was also mentioned many times that the bar for my work and grade would be set by others in my class who had vastly more experience, so I found that disheartening.

Despite my personal shortcomings, I valued the class experience, and still find photonics to be one of the most interesting fields within electrical engineering.