ENGR 1624

Barker is a nice person, but the class mostly subsisted of guest speakers coming in and also a bunch of biomedical engineering focused projects. Lots of writing with a group that got very repetitive. Not a super hard class and not too hard to get an A in.

After fall semester last year, I went to this site to post a review of Barker and my experience in the class. For some reason, she didn't show up on the list, so I checked occasionally whenever I thought of it, because that is how necessary I thought it was to warn people about this class. Is it required? Yes. Does her advertising of it being an introduction to medicine made it seem exciting? Yes. Was it by far the worst class I have taken at UVA? Definitely (still true after my second semester!). It's not the class itself, which is meant to introduce you to engineering, its the professor. She was rarely there (and I do mean rarely), canceled office hours all but two or three times, almost never responded to emails, and was essentially unreachable (her office is in the medical complex, so you can't just 'drop by' unannounced). Remember, she is your adviser for your first year. The class had very little structure to the point where many people stopped showing up, even though we were supposed to be working in teams (which was honestly fine, I kinda hated my team), but all we ever did in our teams was write reports. There was some lectures about different resources and stuff at UVA, but those aren't taught by the professor, rather as an outside presentation, so I can't say anything really about that (kinda boring, but occasionally helpful).
For anyone who is premed and thinks this sounds interesting, do yourself a favor and just don't take this class. Wait an extra semester to meet Barker (she's the BME program adviser) and actually take an intro to engr class that you can have fun in, make friends in, and work in a collaborative setting to create and design and really have a nice introduction to engineering (I lived with a lot of engineers my first year, they all thought my class was insane compared to theirs). This class will NOT solidify your choice to go into medicine, if anything it will dissuade you (and not in a good way). That being said, if you somehow got stuck in this class with this professor and can't switch out, just remember to do your assignments (to a weirdly high standard that is not at all defined) and you can use class time as you please, if you manage to get there.