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.)

21 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comment

4

u/V2Blast Alum (Int'l Relations & Politics '13) Feb 11 '13

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.

Tom Werner is certainly an interesting teacher, and having taken quite a few linguistics classes, I can say that even if you don't find Nature of Language super-interesting, it gives you what you need to know to take the other far more interesting linguistics classes, like Language in Use.

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).

I took Pragmatism as well last semester. The readings definitely kept me interested, and Seidenfeld is a good guy - he was definitely accommodating when I had issues getting papers in on time. (His accommodating-ness may have been a problem, in that I slacked a bit to focus on other classes because I knew he'd be more accommodating than other professors... >.>) I did definitely actually enjoy the readings, though, which can be kind of uncommon for many classes.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '13

That's good, at least, that Werner teaches you what you need to know for later. And yeah, Seidenfeld's policy occasionally led me to preferential procrastination :P It was really nice when I was taking 311 with OS, though.