I went into the class a little bit apprehensive but I warmed up to Professor Xue's style of teaching very quickly. He posts his lecture notes prior to class, and then when he does lecture it's extremely straightforward, straight off of the bullet points. I didn't bother to read the textbook or the lecture notes and still feel like I did extremely well, perhaps because I found Geog 172 Advanced Remote Sensing to be very interesting. It's a lot of statistics, which I like, and I also have an interest in graphic design, so I found the parallels between image manipulation and your average Photoshop usage to be really neat.

Professor Xue is a little bit hard to understand at first, but once you get used to his accent you realize he's got a sense of humor. He has the funniest turns of phrase. "This image has a lot of noise, all these pepper and salts." Every time he said "filter" I felt like he wanted to say "gefilte fish."

Anyway, take 172! It's very interesting even though the labs could take more time than you'd like.

Imma keep it real with you: Professor Xue's lectures are unbelievably soporific. He does have an accent but he's not that difficult to understand. It's just very hard to follow him because he's extremely boring. I attended every lecture but I could never pay attention to him. This brings me to my next point: you don't need the textbook if you pay attention to him. I only needed the textbook because his slides weren't very detailed and I needed the topics to be explained (which he obviously did in class). The labs aren't too hard; you just need to follow the instructions. However, there are some theoretical questions in each lab so I suggest listening in class or using the textbook for those parts. I found the midterm pretty tough even though I studied really hard for it. Luckily, Xue and Karen, his TA, are pretty lenient graders. It's not difficult to do well in this class, but you probably won't enjoy taking it.

Professor Xue has terrible accent to the point it is difficult to understand. The lab assignments took forever to get each one of them done because they took way too long to complete. The midterm was difficult Why is he even still a professor here? Oh, that's right because he has been tenured for a long time. Honestly, he should retire already.