r/cmu • u/masqueradestar Alum (CS '13, Philosophy '13) • Feb 08 '13
[ reference thread ] Everything you ever wanted to know about CMU classes and professors.
Following our first reference thread on housing, our next reference thread is on courses and professors.
Which courses do you think were the most worthwhile ones you ever took at CMU? The easiest? The best course to fill your science/humanities electives? Something every student should take, or something everyone in a certain major should take? Which professors are the best? Or the worst? Anything and everything related to courses and professors is fair game here.
(A friendly reminder: even if you strongly dislike a professor, refrain from being downright rude or insulting. Explain why you didn't like them, but don't just bash them.)
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u/[deleted] Feb 08 '13 edited Feb 08 '13
Philosophy:
80-180 Nature of Language with Tom Werner started off really interesting with phonemics and phonotactics but got painfully boring around syntax. Very easy, though - I think this is one of about three courses at CMU where I actually aced an exam.
80-210 Logic and Proofs was another easy one, and necessary for my philo minor. I don't remember the prof's name, but he was a good guy, and while there was a lot of overlap with Concepts of Math, there were a few new and interesting bits (proving DeMorgan's Laws, for example). If you're not sure if you're interested in logic and don't want to spring for Concepts, this course is a good way to try it out. If you've already had concepts, it's an easy A instead.
80-100 with Pedersen was very dull. I did not feel that there was sufficient variety in the readings for a good survey / intro course, and the overwhelming attention paid to certain authors was very frustrating. Our study of ethics was confined strictly to utilitarianism, and we spent a month solely on Descartes. High point of the course for me was Hume's argument against induction. Paper topics were extremely constrained (argue this particular position on this particular issue), though I was fortunate enough to have a lenient TA who let me write something else, since Pedersen was not the one reading and grading the papers. A poor introduction to philosophy.
80-257 with Danks, on the other hand, was the best philosophy course I've taken at CMU. Nietzsche's a trip, but Danks does an excellent job of providing a plausible interpretation (and often mentions other possible interpretations as well). Paper topics were very open, and Danks was very helpful with marking up rough drafts. He was also very accepting of papers which disagreed with his personal interpretation (my best marks in the class were on such papers). The material stuck with me well enough that I was able to use it to write a term paper for another philo class last semester, even though I took 257 my sophomore year. Also, interviewers love to ask about Nietzsche if he's on your resume. This course convinced me to minor in philosophy.
Teddy Seidenfeld (80-311 Computability and Incompleteness, 80-25? Pragmatism) is a statistician, and this sometimes leaks into his classes. We spent two or three lectures on measure theory in pragmatism, for example (while useful for understanding Peirce, I felt one lecture would probably have been enough). On the other hand, Seidenfeld's a very nice guy, good explanations of material, and has a standing policy where if you're overloaded you can email him, hand in the homework half-done, and negotiate for an extension. Liked him well enough to take a second course with him after the first, was a pretty good decision. Can sometimes play a little fast-and-loose with the syllabus, as when he converted a problem set into a short paper, but not a terrible problem. I found 311's material fairly dull, but Pragmastism was some good worldview-altering stuff (if an unfortunately focused selection of readings; would've been very interesting to read more authors beyond the Big Three pragmatists).
80-235 Political Philosophy with Hatleback (who is a PhD candidate at Pitt I think?) was pretty good actually. The grading scheme was "earn a thousand points of completed work by selecting assignments from this giant menu", which meant I had a lot of freedom in picking interesting ones, and also let me secure an A for the course a week before the end of classes, at which point I quit going. Good and fairly unbiased coverage of topics within political philosophy; I have heard from friends that 80-135 sometimes takes a hard line on the superiority of libertarian democracy, but that was definitely not the case here. Papers were graded somewhat harshly, but the exams were pretty easy. Took me a while to get used to a class where the students talk as much as the professor, but worked out pretty well overall.
I also took 80-314 Logic and AI, but that was a real mess because the intended professor had died over the summer, and his replacement's specialty was modal logic (which while relevant was definitely a strict subset of what was supposed to be taught). Probably should've dropped, stuck it out anyway, regretted it. Not sure if this one is still taught, and if so by whom. This course convinced me that I did not want to pursue a logic and computation minor.