This course is very challenging. The course offered either zoom, in-person or pre-recorded lectures. The course is math intensive and the homeworks are very challenging. The professor could not attend class in-person many times, but it was conducted at least through zoom or the TA was able to replace him. The course is well structured and it was really neat to solve real time problems using Abaqus and apply what was learned in class. Great professor. The use of piazza was very useful and it allowed us to collaborate when questions came up.

Goyal is such a great professor! Definitely requires a lot from students but I have learned so much about engineering in general and how to set up problems and what to look for. how to question results. analyze results. why safety is important. Goyal is funny, witty, and interactive with students. sometimes intimidating. a lot of work in the class but you'll definitely feel that rewarding feeling after taking his course. great that he provided many extra credit opportunities to help us students manage time and earn that A.

By far both the greatest class I've taken at UCLA, but also by far the most workload. Many of the concepts can be pretty "mathy" but the projects that he assigns (1 project every other week) are really awesome projects ranging from aircraft wing analysis, fuselage buckling, launch vehicle analysis, composite analysis, all of which are straight from his connections with industry. If you want to learn something useful that will conglomerate all of what you've learned in your undergrad thus far, take this class without a doubt, but be sure you're seriously willing to put in upwards of 10-15 hours of work a week.
PS No final or midterms, just 5 homeworks, 5 projects, and alot of extra credit

This class was a roller coaster. Vinay Goyal is unlike any other professor I have ever had. For one thing, he's from industry, so he approaches things from a "common sense" or intuition perspective instead of an academic approach. Additionally, he throws extra credit at students. Seriously, I ended up with so much extra credit by the end of the quarter that my quiz category was worth over 150%. Halfway through the final, I decided to leave the hardest questions unfinished because I was confident that I would get an A. Finally, Goyal is truly invested in seeing his students succeed. For the first half of the class (statics), he created Youtube videos to go over numerous example problems so that, in his own words, we would have no excuse to not do well on the exam.

There are a few downsides to this class, however. Goyal is a bit unpredictable. Meaning that he stopped doing Youtube videos halfway through the class because he got offended by an alleged complaint, and he gave us a very computational midterm without a calculator because he was afraid we would cheat. On the plus side, Goyal was not hesitant to change up his teaching style if what he did wasn't working, and as mentioned before, he gave out easy extra credit quizzes if he liked the level of participation.

Overall, this class was good for learning statics pretty well and gaining an introduction to mechanics of materials. Goyal likes to stress the easiness of his class, which is true if you have a good intuition for mechanics and do plenty of practice. However, I thought he went a little too fast through topics like stress/strain and deflection, and therefore I did not develop as much intuition as with statics.

One thing I noticed was that a lot of people did not take this class seriously and missed easy points. Don't be like those people: go to class, do the HW thoroughly, and do the example problems he assigns, and you will not have to worry about your grade at all.