STS 4500

Professor was kind of condescending and in-your-face in lecture. Would ask questions and butt in while you were responding, and came off as rude and abrasive. Lectures were really boring and she somehow spent 1 hour and 15 min talking about absolutely nothing. She would use buzzwords like 'IoT', 'smart cities', and 'machine learning' a lot without really explaining them in depth, and basically I got the idea that she had no idea what she was talking about in lecture. She graded harshly on assignments without giving students a rubric beforehand or even explaining the assignment in class at all.

Random things on collab would be due at the end of the week, without any mention of them at all in class. We also had a 'Global Classroom' that wasn't integrated well at all with the lecture. It was basically an STS group of 3 kids sending students in a chinese university a set of 3 questions per week, and they would respond with their answers on WeChat. The global classroom initiatives weren't really addressed during lecture, and felt like a side project that we never acknowledged outside of turning in a table of responses each week. Poorly structured and expectations on assignments were not communicated well to students. Do not recommend.

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

Definitely, the wost STS 4500/4600 you could possibly get. She snuck in an extra class period not listed on SIS where attendance is expected - uncool. She clearly sympathizes with Communist ideals and teaches the class from that slant - uncool. She is incapable of tolerating opposing viewpoints, which I at least think should be a prerequisite for teaching a college class - uncool. She has made the fourth-year engineering prospectus into a group project - uncool. She focuses the class on "Smart Cities" and claims to be an expert on "Smart Cities" even though she never defined what a "Smart City" is and can't describe what makes a city smart - uncool. She has restricted the group projects and thus the prospectuses to focus on smart cities (read Sociology/Civil E) - This was my breaking point. I am usually pretty tolerable of "uncoolness" in classes but you have to draw the line somewhere. I feel like I could have gotten past all of this if I could just choose what to write my prospectus about, which I'm fairly sure is a freedom granted to all other sections of STS 4500. Maybe she has been inspired by one too many Communist ideals. So, to all you third years - ANYONE BUT KU (and Ferguson too because Ku metastasised into his sections as well).