PHYS 3210

This is an excellent course. Classical mechanics might not sound like the most exciting physics course there is, but if you like physics, you'll most likely find the material in this course interesting and engaging. In this class, we covered Chapters 1-11 and 13 of Taylor's Classical Mechanics book, which includes a review of intro physics in greater depth, Lagrangian mechanics, the two-body problem, accelerating and rotating frames, rotations of rigid bodies, coupled oscillators, and Hamiltonian mechanics. A big plus of this course is that you are learning how to model the dynamics of everyday objects, which you already have an established intuition for.

A lot of people didn't show up to Prof. Heeck's lectures this semester (because he covers the topics of the textbook in order), but I would recommend attending them because Prof. Heeck teaches the material in a clear and engaging way and presents different perspectives. He is also very helpful when people have questions in class, does cool physics demonstrations sometimes, and has a good sense of humor. Importantly, he does a good job of emphasizing the big picture of the physics, which I think is especially important in a subject like classical mechanics.

The homework is usually 3-5 problems from the textbook per week, which I thought were generally well-chosen to effectively aid in understanding the material (and some of problems are also often fun to think about) but not be too long, difficult, or tedious. There are two exams, a midterm and a final, and they are entirely fair and completable in the given time. The questions are certainly easier than the homework problems, so if you're able to do those, you'll have no problem on the exams.

Overall, this is a well-taught course with interesting material that I highly recommend taking.

Prof. Heeck is super nice and passionate about what he's teaching. He is very generous with exam curves and gives extra credit on homeworks towards the end of the semester. His lectures are pretty much just repeating exactly what the textbook says, so you can either read the textbook or listen to his lectures... either one will give you the same information, so whatever works best for you. Heeck also required us to write a short research paper during the second half of the semester, which I think was a really great way of introducing us to how to write formal and well-researched papers, and also gave us an opportunity to dive deeper into a topic that we were interested in (he graded the papers pretty harshly though).

Heeck lets you have a 1-sided formula sheet for the midterm and a 2-sided formula sheet for the final, and the exam questions are pretty easy. Just make sure to have a lot of formulas on your formula sheet.

Unfortunately, the minimum threshold for an A was a 95 this semester, but it's still super attainable if you work hard on the homework sets and study adequately for exams.