SYS 3021

This course was co-taught by Professors Louis and Riggs with Louis teaching most of the Excel-based portions and Riggs teaching more of the harder math portions.

Professor Louis tends to go pretty slow and can be pretty boring, but its also pretty easy to catch up by yourself on his sections by just reading the textbook which takes like 20 minutes maximum.

Professor Riggs is my absolute favorite and makes this class such a joy. He always tries to make sure everyone is on track, engaged, and entertained with a lot of fun examples and personal stories. He is also such a casual, friendly guy that makes the atmosphere when he teaches so much better.

They also encourage a pretty lax grading system on homework to make sure students get as many points as possible there, but the points taken off on exams are more to scale of how much the part of the answer makes up the entire solution so don't go too chill.

If you do any of the following: pay decent attention in class, go to TA office hours, or just ask Professor Riggs questions outside of class you're basically guaranteed an A.

I always love every class taught by Professor Riggs because of his teaching style and because of how he shows he truly values the students learning the information rather than formalities in grading.

This class also just teaches a ton of pretty applicable Excel skills I can see in general life, but especially if you're looking into going into data analytics, supply chain, business, consulting, etc.

This class acts as an introduction to decision, with a focus on deterministic problems. There is discussion on probabilistic methods, but it is mostly saved for SYS 3060. Overall, this class was very interesting and not too much work. A majority of the class is in-class example problems that occur throughout the semester, two exams, and a final project. Both exams are manageable if you stay on top of studying the material in class, rather than what is in the textbook. The class begins with modeling decisions in Excel, which becomes easy if you follow the formatting in class. The content then introduces set notation, where there is no actual data used until the very end. This transition can be a challenge for some, and it takes a lot of practice to become used to this formulation style. Once you become comfortable with the different examples from class, the exam and final project aren't too difficult. Overall, this was a great class, one of the few I would recommend for non-Systems majors.