ENGR 1621

This is an entirely self-taught course with a lab due every Friday at 11:59 pm until the end of the semester. I have never used Matlab in my life and this course did not explain that very well. The office hours are always at night (6:30 - 8:30pm) except on Friday's when they are from 2-4pm. I legit would go to office hours Monday - Wednesday from 6:30pm-8:30pm just to finish the lab before Friday and sometimes would even have to go Thursday and Friday too. Doing the multiple-choice part of the quizzes is pretty simple since you can read the pdfs they give you or just retake it, however the excel and Matlab parts were almost impossible for me to figure out without help from a TA. This course actually showed me that I'm not 100% sure I want to do engineering and I've been considering other majors because using Matlab and excel sucks.

This class was the bane of my existence. It is essentially self taught the whole semester. When you start out with Excel everything is fine, but then MATLAB happens. GO TO THE TA OFFICE HOURS. The TAs will help you out and basically spell out the correct answer for you sometimes. DO NOT START THIS THE DAY BEFORE IT IS DUE. The assignments can take hours and hours so do not procrastinate. The assignments will like haunt you the whole week until you do them, so it’s much better to chip away at it instead of having a mental breakdown on Thursday. You will despise MATLAB.

This part of the Intro to Eng. is pretty annoying. There is basically no professor -- you are just given a series of tasks and quizzes to do each week. I guess the information you learn is useful, but it is super tedious and will take up 3ish hours per week. It's not that difficult, just time-consuming.

This course is entirely online. Prof. Reimers communicates requirements and weekly assignments clearly. The first half is Excel and the second half is MatLab. The work isn't hard, especially in the beginning, but the MatLab portion, especially towards the end, is extremely tedious. It takes at least 3 hours and is a lot of boring, busy work. The skills can be useful but you'll have to keep them up after the course. You can easily get a high grade to boost your ENGR grade as well! #tCF2020

*During COVID, completely online [#tCF2020]
First half of the course is easy, it's just going over excel and how to use it. If you're not familiar with it, you're going to be watching a lot of videos so you better have a video speed controller or something and just crank that up to get through them.
Harder section was the Matlab section, it started off okay, then got worse. Honestly, you're gonna need to utilize some corporate knowledge here/join groupchats of other engineering students or go to the office hours held on Friday (or before that if you don't procrastinate) about how to do this crap when you get stuck.
You can also go to the Friday office hours for them to review the graphs you make and anything you have questions on for the written portions of the weekly quizzes (but every quiz has an unlimited number of submissions, most are MC, and none are timed so as long as you get them all done before Friday you're good).
Usually, I would just complete the entire homework section or 2/3 of it on Thursdays, and the rest of it before the Friday office hours at 2 or just go anyway and finish the rest of it after consulting them.
Got an A in the class, just manage to get like 97% on something for the first excel half, get 95 or 92 on the first half of the Matlab half or more, and then just try your best on those last sections and you'll get an A in the class easy.
Be warned though, during those more difficult sections, the office hours on Friday get packed and there are like 30+ minute wait times to getting a TA to help you.

My friend who is a TA for this class says that this class teaches you how to teach yourself engineering. If this is engineering, then I don't want it. The assignments were graded too harshly where you would be penalized for coming up with creative solutions or making any tiny mistake. The class is just hours upon hours of busy work that you have to complete every Friday. The assignments felt mundane and I do not actually feel as if I learned anything worthwhile, especially since the majority of the work I did for the class was repressed by my brain. There would be weeks where I would be trying to get simple code to run and it wouldn't work. My friends and TA's would try to help, but their efforts would be to no avail. Every Friday would have me saying "screw this" as I submitted my quizzes, fully accepting that the random number generator used to determine my grade could very well screw me over. I would go out on weekends just to get over this 1 credit class. My grades were all over the place and I got multiple weeks where my score was near perfect and some weeks where I'd scrape by with 50%. This all feels like a fever dream. I wish the first years that have to take this class good luck and remember to use the instant feedback feature. My first half of the semester had terrible grades because I didn't realize how to use it.

-an ex e-school school student

Bruh...

Yep, this class sucks. You just gotta get through it. My biggest advice is to make friends early-on with the TAs, and go to the first couple help-sessions of the week (as opposed to waiting until Friday). I didn't have a group to work on this with, which really sucked. Find a group to work on this with if you can.

This class is BS. It is not hard but you just gotta get through it. Just make sure you stay on top of it and you'll be fine

This class is the epitome of Engineering. This class has way to much work for a 1 credit. But unfortunately this class is required for all first years, and all I have to say is good luck.

The only thing I can offer you is some advice on how to survive. 1)Form Groups, I can not stress how important this is. There will be weeks that you do not have 15 hours to give up on this course. There will also be times where your classmates know more than the TAs. 2)When you do need help ask Professor Reimers and not the TAs, they suck. If you do go to the TAs find the one that gives you answers and knows how to do it. And also go early in the week, if you go later you will not be able to get help. 3) The only important thing from the course is the quick start guide, because depending on your major you will need to use it later.