CS 2150

Mark Floryan is the best teacher that I have ever had. It's obvious how passionate he is about CS and it shows when he lectures. He makes lectures fun and interesting to go to because he'll randomly go on tangents about very small things, but it's always fun. Despite Floryan, CS 2150 was THE hardest class I have ever taken in my entire life. It ate up my life and my sleep schedule. I could barely focus on the other classes that I had during the semester. You would see me in office hours every Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 5-11. It really made me question my life choices and made me consider another major. This is the weeder class - those who pass are meant to be in CS. I had about six friends who changed their CS major to a minor because of this class. The amount of work is ridiculous for only a 3 credit class. However, Bloomfield and Floryan know that this class is hard and try their best to be "lenient". This course is changing because of the new curriculum, so I'm not sure how hard it will continue to be. Make friends in the class. Have study groups. GO. TO. LECTURES. I cannot stress that enough. Sometimes, Floryan would turn off the class recording to tell you something helpful for the labs to reward those who come to class. He will recognize you the more you come to class, and he WILL appreciate it and reward you. Despite the difficulty of 2150, it taught me so much. It was all worth it in the end, trust me. You will hate yourself, you'll hate the class, you'll hate the instructors, but it's a very rewarding experience to be done with it and have so much more knowledge in CS.

First of all, Mark Floryan is great! Phenomenal lecturer, super friendly, extremely good at explaining complex topics simply. That being said, there is simply too much material crammed together for this course. Each week there is a prelab, an in-lab, and a post-lab, each of which took me at minimum 3 hours, and oftentimes far more, which varied in difficulty week to week. The material goes by fairly rapidly-if you fail to watch a recording, you will have a fair amount of catching up to do. The exams are mostly fair, but make sure to read EVERYTHING in the slides carefully, and don't assume anything is unimportant unless explicitly told so, because exams oftentimes reference bits of "trivia." For the updated CS curriculum, they are breaking the material covered in this class into multiple classes, which feels a lot more sane to me. Overall, the material is good, but the workload is too high for a 3 credit course.