PHYS 1930

If you (like me) are a prospective first year Physics major and have no idea what the different fields of Physics are, I would overall recommend this class. The first couple of weeks/first half of the semester area quite helpful to understanding the subject, but once you've gotten a broad overview of the different facets, the usefulness of this class quickly diminishes.

Each week you're expected to read an article from some scientific journal within the field of Physics (many options are given in Canvas or you can find your own) and then class time is meant to encourage discussion between students of the things they learned from reading these articles. The main problem with this however is that the articles are generally written at a level where you're kind of able to understand the concepts being addressed but definitely not the nuances, leaving the discussions rather basic and unhelpful. Similar idea with guest lecturers that would come in, but speak at a conceptual level that most students couldn't fully understand. For this reason, after the first couple of weeks you tend to just zone out and get the attendance credit.

Extremely easy A. Grade consists of 6 one-page papers that are each just a summary of one of the articles you read, and take no longer than an hour or two including reading the article. The papers are graded pretty much for completion, and then the remainder of the grade comes from attendance. Overall I would recommend this as it did give me a better understanding of the field that I'm majoring in, but prepare for the class to get really dull by the halfway point.