This class is not really as bad as some of the other reviews make it seem. Yes, the lectures can be boring and slow at times, and they often feel like the professor is mostly reading from the slides. The “lecture” structure is usually split between slides and a lab/coding demonstration. I personally did learn a lot from the lectures, but obviously a one-hour coding session introducing a bunch of new concepts is not enough to fully master the material. You definitely need to practice outside of class.

There is no traditional homework, but there is a lot of DataCamp assigned. In practice, the DataCamp basically acts as the homework for the course, and the assigned modules are directly related to the skills you need for the exams and project. I know a lot of people used AI for the DataCamp or rushed through it without really paying attention, which is probably one of the worst mistakes you can make in this class. If you actually do the DataCamp and understand it, the class becomes much more manageable.

The exams are also not as bad as people make them sound. The best part is that they are not really graded on perfect syntax, so if you understand the ideas and can explain what you are trying to do, you will usually be fine. Some parts of the exams also allow paper notes, which helps a lot. Most of your grade comes from participation, two exams, and a final project. The final project has checkpoints throughout the semester, so it never feels like you are being forced to build the whole thing at the end of the year.

One thing to know is that you need a 95% for an A, which sounds scary at first. However, there is around 3% extra credit available, so in practice it feels more like the A cutoff is closer to a 92% if you take advantage of those opportunities.

Overall, the topics in the class are actually really interesting and useful. You cover database management, data engineering, entity-relationship diagrams, data pipelines, and some machine learning. These are all concepts that are very relevant for the rest of the Systems Engineering major and for a lot of internships students do during their second and third-year summers.

I would recommend the class for Systems Engineering students (you probably have to take it), especially if you actually want to learn practical data and database skills. I probably would not recommend it to students outside of Systems unless they are specifically interested in data engineering or databases.

This might be genuinely the worst class I have taken at UVA. The professor is terrible, the class structure is horrible... the worst part is that the content is actually interesting and very relevant to the major. So, it is actually quite disappointing that the experience was so negative. She barely taught and gave no HW. Which, in theory, sounds great but then there is no practice at all before exams. So, then, everyone fails the exams because that's basically our first time solving out questions on our own.

This class was the only class that I took at UVA that I felt like was not worth my tuition or my time. Professor Doryab is surely a nice person, but not a good teacher. Every lecture is immensely monotone, boring, and all she does is read off the slides and code to an audience of 200 students. One redeeming quality of the class is that the labs are quite useful and would come in handy to anyone trying to use SQL in their work later on

The class itself consists of a midterm (extremely hard, but curved) and a final, as well as 3 extra credit opportunities, labs, and a semester long project worht 30% of your grade

Overall, I completely understand having this class as a requirement for the Systems Engineering major, but couldn't UVA find a slightly better lecturer?

These concepts in this class are a great introduction to database management and ways to manage information. I am hesitant to say this about the class itself because the course could definitely be improved. It was very hard to find things about the class in the Syllabus, so there were a lot of surprises throughout the semester. The mix of lectures and labs during the week was for completion, and only a certain number of each were needed, but if you miss any of these, it's pretty difficult to get any info from the lectures. The class is focused on the concepts of data management, which rely heavily on your ability to program. There are a lot of online coding courses assigned that are almost never talked about during class. It made the connections between coding and the concepts harder. Professor Doryab understands the content well but doesn't do a great job of conveying both the content and class expectations. We spent the first semester coding in MySQL, and then for the second half we coded in Python. This was annoying because the entirety of the final project was coded in Python. I think this class is important for understanding data management, but I wouldn't recommend it for anyone not in Systems Engineering.

This class was poorly ran and just overall very disorganized. It’s not a super difficult class, but this semester the class time was truly a complete waste almost. The final project rubric was not given to us in a timely manner and it wasn’t exactly clear how the grading worked for the final project which was 30% of the grade.

Wouldn't recommend taking it with Prof. Doryab. She is nice enough and reasonably knowledgeable about the course content, but the structure this semester was pretty frustrating. A lot of the expectations about assignments weren't clearly communicated, lecture wasn't really helpful (did most of the learning through Hadley Wickham's R4DS book), and the class structure kept changing through the middle of the semester. I personally didn't get too much value out of the assignments this semester, but overall I did end up learning a fair bit about how to program in R, I guess. The project was long and took a lot of time (and similarly the rubric for it didn't exist until like a week after it began.) However, maybe some of these things will be smoothed out in later iterations - I think this is only her second time teaching the course, and it was over Zoom, as well. Basically, the course just felt very disorganized. That was the main difficulty, the actual content of the course isn't too hard to grasp.