STS 4500

Take this class with Sean. He’s the only professor (to my knowledge) who doesn’t give absolute BS assignments which waste your time. There are a handful of assignments which are centered around your prospectus/thesis, which are requirements to graduate. He makes the class way less painful than any other STS course I’ve taken just by using interesting and engaging material and being a genuinely nice dude. He’s the best, 10/10 would recommend.

The co-teaching section of Ferguson and Ku is the worst class ever. If you think STS 1500 is a nightmare, this class will truly give you a sense of bad and useless class. The idea behind this experimental section may be good, but the professors are so unorganized and don't care about what they are teaching.

Ferguson seems like a good guy, but it was a bad decision to teach jointly with Ku. For some reason, they are trying to turn my senior research prospectus at UVa into a group project.

Imagine a section of STS where you were obligated to write not only one prospectus but those of five other people as well. That is how this class do.

Also, this class is filled with Communist propaganda. It kind of feels like Ku's mission to dissolution us with Democracy and to convince us that an Authoritarian government can develop technology more efficiently.

They also added an extra 1 credit class to the course at 7:00 pm on Mondays, made attendance mandatory, and then proceded to give us no credit for it. That was basically a giant "FU, your time isn't valuable so we'll just make you either stick around grounds until 8 pm every Monday" even though this was not advertised on SIS beforehand.

Also, their brilliant way of incorporating sociology with engineering is to basically force every group to do their prospectus based on Civil Engineering. While this may work out great for Civil Engineers, everyone else is screwed because now your prospectus isn't about your capstone project, but it's actually just about some random Civil Engineering topic that you don't care about. The only way to fix this is to change professors and good luck with that: it's either out of the frying pan and into the fire or impossible because of enrollment permissions.

Also, they are not very good communicators. Ferguson is often patient and tries to reexplain if people understand but Ku will treat it like it's your fault for not understanding.

Only take this class, if you are a Communist Civil Engineer who is also a Mind Reader and has enough time to teach Civil Engineering practice to all her team members and write their prospectuses for them because it's all one big group project.

Some of the assignments were really annoying, and the organization of the class online was kind of a mess, but Ferguson really listens to the class and what people think is and is not working. Online classes is new for everyone so can't really fault him too much for that. Ferguson definitely puts a ton of effort into helping each of his students and you can tell he's really engaged in your work and how you are doing. He's super understanding and even though I didn't love some of the assignments or the organization I think Ferguson is a good choice.