APMA 1110

I mean, he isn't a bad guy (very funny actually), but his lecture style and notes could use some work. What I believe a plethora of professors (including McMillan) struggle with is using layman's terms to describe subjects, whatever they may be. If there is a new topic, you are 90% guaranteed to teach it to yourself. McMillan also likes to talk A LOT about theory and some of the intuition behind why the structure of the math is the way that it is, but yet again, I feel that he does not do enough of a job explaining it. If you understand the topic he is teaching or you have taken calc 2 before take him, you will enjoy the class; otherwise, stay away from this guy. Also, go to his office hours! He will explain any topic you want to understand.

McMillan is a great guy, but an average professor. The class is structured into 3 lecture days and 1 discussion/presentation day per week. His lectures tend to be focused on the theoretical aspect of the topic, and while it does give you good background, it often leaves you unprepared for the HWs since we typically don't run through many problems in class and is sometimes unnecessary considering this is a basic APMA prerequisite. His teaching style often leaves students feeling like they need to put in a ton of work outside of class to gain the knowledge of doing the problem sets for HW and exams. That being said, McMillan is a pretty understanding guy and attendance is not mandatory.

Whether or not you will like Professor McMillan is, I think, largely a matter of your learning style. This semester, we had the chance, due to an unfortunate circumstance of Professor McMillan, to briefly "sample" multiple different professors while he was away, so I feel qualified to compare/contrast them for you.

Professor McMillan's style is probably the most theory-heavy of the three professors that I have tried (this includes Fernando and Abramenko), but he still does a lot of examples and practice problems. He would occasionally skip over a topic so we would have to learn it ourselves, but was generally quite thorough. I personally really enjoyed the way he explained things using actual mathematical language and sort of non-rigorous proofs. Fernando is I think the antithesis to his style: she explains everything in "layman's terms" using analogies that many of my classmates really appreciated but I found very confusing. Whichever of these sounds better for you should help you make an informed choice about which section to choose!

Professor McMillan is a very nice and understanding guy and I really like the format of his notes which seems to be more in depth than other sections. But if you do not enjoy thinking about things from a mathematical perspective, then this may not be the section for you.

For context, I personally got an A in the course; had taken AP Calc BC previously but did not score well enough for credit.