STS 4500

Professor Baritaud is the best. She is very smart, almost too smart for her own good. She will push you hard and make you work for your Prospectus. It is worth it though.

Prof. Baritaud is a good lecturer. She is engaging and animated in class and has a good personality. The biggest key to succeeding in this class is engaging in class participation. If you can repeatedly show that you are engaged with the material, Baritaud is a more than fair grader and an enjoyable person to interact with. There is not too much outside work in this class so long as you keep up with weekly readings, which you can mostly skim. When it does come time to write one of your key assignments for the class (statement of topics, prospectus, etc.), work hard and you will be rewarded. I would recommend this professor for 4500.

Baritaud is the professor to take for STS 4500 if you want to be informed about thesis requirements and feel like you put out good-quality thesis deliverables. She's incredibly accessible for office hours and makes class interesting as much as she can, although any STS course has a bore factor you just have to get over. I'd totally recommend her to anyone on the fence about professors.

If you're recruiting for jobs while you have to take this class, then you might not want to take it with Catherine. She frontloads the class so you're done by November, but that's also the biggest job recruiting season. You can only miss 2 classes and you have to submit a written note. You can't use technology in the class. She assigns a lot of readings that you have to write journal entries (she never checked ours). She assigned a couple of extra writing assignments (statement of topics, reading response papers). I used my entire statement of topics in my prospectus, so that was helpful. She cares a little too much about APA citations and formatting than your actual writing. She assigns annoying work, but she is also the only STS teacher that really knows the thesis guidelines. A lot of people in other classes are scrambling to get their prospectus done because they don't even know what it is. She can grade harshly but as long as you show that you tried, she'll give you an A. She says that she's "bad at math so some people that get D's on their first prospectus draft can still end up with an A on their transcript"

Baritaud can be extremely intolerant of questions she doesn't like and her responses to those questions is not right. I'm not someone who minds tough, blunt or direct professors and I've had a few at UVA. However, the way she responds to questions sometimes (I've seen her yell at a student in class when he asked a question about his APA formatting) is simply not acceptable. It's extremely rude, verging on outright hostile.

Probably my least favorite class here, and I got a 60 in OS. I do believe Prof Baritaud wants her students to improve, but she's pretty bad at it by not providing useful feedback and being rude in general. Not fun at all but if you pretend like you're trying you'll be fine.

From other reviews, I can see I was not alone in my displeasure with her as a professor. She will go on tangents in class about things that are basically "So this one time when I did so and so" that barely relate to the material. It is boring, and I have noticed some students consistently almost fall asleep in her class, despite going in there full of energy. Then there were the assignments. From what I have heard, she tacks on a lot of extra work to STS classes in comparison to other STS professors, and especially during fall recruiting season, it barely leaves any time to try to get a job in the real world. She will then take forever grading papers, give back minimalist and inconsistent feedback. She places a lot of emphasis on APA format however seems to not fully understand it herself. An example, when I turned in my first Prospectus draft, she marked some things as APA, most as not. Next submission, I don't touch those citations, and she then marks the ones that were previously correct as now incorrect. Then there are the journals. She will have you write journals and submit them all semester on mostly random topics (One was on cat litter, another on Prometheus), and then not grade them until the very end with no feedback, and combine it with other attendance grades so you have no idea why. Speaking of attendance, it is mandatory, classes are not recorded, and if you need to miss class, you need to let her know in advance and write a memo about why you're missing, with a max of 2 absences before you're penalized. Definitely the professor who would say "Well you used your 2 absences, so if you go to your grandparent's funeral it will affect your participation grade." Final notes, this is turning into a rant, she will mock you if you say something that is not within her worldview of being right (not necessarily actually right). I have actually gotten off of a zoom call with her about my paper and cried because she made me feel like an idiot, despite my paper being good according to other people. Avoid her at all costs.

STS in general — This is easily the worst class I've ever taken at UVA, bar none (I will update this review if STS 4600 turns out to be worse but I doubt it). Much of this is due to Professor Baritaud as an instructor, but I think more broadly that STS 4500 and 4600 are fundamentally just badly designed courses. The idea behind STS, in general, seems to be that the SEAS wants students to engage with non-engineering disciplines and connect them to engineering practice in a way that gives the student a better understanding of how to interact with the world in an ethical and informed way. However, because most of the professors I've seen so blatantly mistrust their student's ability to comprehend non-engineering concepts (or the professors are otherwise inept), the class ends up being milquetoast and boring beyond belief. No information that challenged any of my preconceived beliefs or enlightened me in any way was presented. This class is exactly what you would imagine if someone said "waste of time sociology-lite class". I genuinely believe every engineering student would have a more fruitful experience if they were allowed to choose a humanities class of their choice (similar to the CS Integrated Elective system for the college) to replace this credit. They could even keep the Prospectus and Thesis, just change the actual content. Anyways, with that aside...

Professor Baritaud — There were many days in which I was walking to Professor Baritaud's class and thought "I would genuinely rather receive 40 lashes than sit through this class for another second." There were many lectures in which the entire 1 hour and 15 minutes were taken up by Professor Baritaud going over a single rubric for a single assignment. This was genuinely torturous in a way that is difficult to put into writing. Thankfully, the assignments were actually very easy in my opinion, especially considering Professor Baritaud did not grade half of them despite claiming she would. The only assignments that actually matter at all are those related to the Prospectus, and Professor Baritaud is particularly brutal about grading formatting mistakes and citation issues. She doesn't actually check any citations (I left a bogus one in just to check), she only skims for formatting broadly. Your Prospectus could be complete nonsense and there would likely be no issue as long as the formatting was perfect.

Overall, you cannot avoid taking this course if you are an engineer at UVa (sadly), but please do yourself a favor by taking it with literally anyone else if you can.