MSE 2090

McDonnell is a nice guy and it's clear that he has passion for the class and teaching. My biggest gripe with the class is that I did not like the Guided Inquiry style of teaching that he and Floro do, which is where you and your group work through questions to learn certain concepts. If you get stuck with a bad group, it makes it pretty unenjoyable to learn what is otherwise objectively interesting content because it's hard to talk to people who aren't interested in discussion. For me, I got placed with someone who would argue with me about the simplest of facts and disbelieve any evidence I gave until I searched up the answer to prove my point, which got pretty exhausting. Some of the other profs like Burns just lecture and get through way more of the content than we do, so I think I might've preferred to do that instead.

However, I do think McDonnell does a good job of making you learn the content thoroughly and I feel like I have a good basis from this class. I thought the project was a bit difficult (usually there are two, for us only one), so definitely go to his office hours to inquire about aesthetic choices and have him check your graphs if possible, because he was much stricter on those aspects than I thought he would be. Still a great class, I just didn't enjoy the Guided Inquiry because of the people I was put with personally. Worth taking for sure. #tCFS24

McDonnell was a great and funny professor. The class had a very light workload in terms of homework, but if you want to do well you have to do a fair bit of studying on your own. I recommend re-watching the lectures and doing homework problems as studying rather than reading the textbook. The textbook was very dense and a lot of the stuff in it wasn't covered in lecture. McDonnell only tested on stuff from lectures so make sure you attend or watch them. I thought the exams were fair, some questions were difficult but they were open book because of COVID. I don't know if he'll keep them open book in the future. He gives a lot of extra credit opportunities, like doing extra problems on the HW, or going to exam review sessions, and even filling out the course evaluations, so you can definitely bump up your grade by half a letter in this class if you put enough effort. Overall a very interesting class in my opinion and made me interested in materials science.

#tCFspring2021 I took this class mainly because it seemed the least annoying from the Science II electives for engineering undergrad. What I found was a really enjoyable class. Prof. McDonnell is a really good lecturer and the ideas in the class are very easy to understand for people in engineering or sciences. Make sure you go to extra credit reviews and study for the exams.

McDonnell is a great guy. It is obvious that he cares very much about his students. He also manages to make Materials Science engaging and interesting. Take this course with him if you can.

I thought this class might be interesting but I was wrong. This class was such a headache that I wish I had not taken. Everything starts out super simple and easy and then you blink and have absolutely no clue what is going on anymore. McDonnell was ok, but I think that Floro and Burns are better. If you don't have options you'll probably get a decent grade, but it was not fun or interesting at all.

I really like Professor McDonnell, he did his best to make a difficult class as easy and interesting as possible. He was fair in his grading, even when it was a group project. Tests are difficult but doable. I highly recommend office hours. There are also a lot of opportunities for extra credit, which I recommend taking.

Wonderful class and proffesor. It's a science elective, but if you're planning to do Mech E or Aero, definetly take this class. It introduces to topics that will be used in later materials science based classes. McDonnell teaches the course in a lecture based format, which I enjoy. The topics are extremely fascinating and interesting, but it is hard to fully focus and take in everything throughout the whole class (it was an hour and 15 minutes). Some concepts are challenging to understand and there are some crazy homework problems. What helps a great deal is looking at the textbook examples because they give you a good start to those type of problems. The best solution is to go to office hours. Most people found this course to be doable throughout the semester, but somethings didn't click for me at all. I had previously ignored this and tried to just memorize information for the test which ended up badly. Attend his office hours. He is amazing working one on one and will explain complex topics in a steady and clear manner.

Tl;dr
- Great Proffesor
- Interesting material
- Credit hours and the amount of time you spend on the material outside of class matches up quite nicely.
- Office hours were wonderful and use them to your advantage. Please start doing this early so you have wiggle room on the final (I found it to be the hardest of all the exams we took in the class).