<p>To the original poster: Talk to engineering students that don’t get straight As, heck, talk to the ones that do get straight As and see how many of them tell you to retake Calc II. Make sure they are junior year and above, freshmen don’t count because they are still naive and have not taken the course yet. </p>
<p>To boneh3dad: Are you a college professor or PhD; you are from College Station? The only way Calc II will impact his grad school app is when it puts a dent in his GPA and wastes his time. </p>
<p>I have met engineers who have forgotten to integrate and still do their jobs just fine, that ought to clue you in on the importance of the Taylor Series. Boneh3dad’s advice reminds me of the admissions person who recommended I should take honors Calc II because it’s oh so good for my future. There was an air of, “you won’t just skate by” if you take the course. Well I d**n near skated out of college with that advice. I did pass Calculus II, but the regular version, and that was very hard too.</p>
<p>To chriscollege: I have one more year left in engineering college. Afterwards, life is bound to get better, right?</p>
<p>To balthezar: I don’t know professor Laugessen. However, I do not recommend Emil Boca. Check him out on ratemyprofessor, you’ll find more people in agreement with me on that fine pubblication.</p>
<p>UIUC is funny because it has broken some of my ethnic stereotypes. I thought professors from certain places would be awful, and others not so… Ultimately, your schedule will force you to take most of your classes with a professor whether you like him or not, especially in engineering. That being said, if the ratemyprofessor ratings have a critical mass of people saying, “omg, stay away at all costs” and that is repeated over 5 times (I’ve been taught to quantify by engineering college so I figured I’d define “critical mass of people”), then do your best to avoid the animal in question.</p>
<p>That being said, take the advice below with a chuckle and some salt. Please, don’t admonish my lack of political correctness. These are the unadulterated thoughts of many engineering students typed here for you on college confidential. </p>
<p>I would stay away from Eastern European professors. Every single professor from that part of the world has been horrible, especially in math, but engineering too. Names like Boca, Starzewski, and this other Russian math professor, were awful. These guys were educated in a state controlled university system that makes UIUC seem like Neverneverland, or whatever M. Jackson’s paradise for kids is called. The teachers over there were brutal, mean spirited, and had little to no oversight over them. If you failed college there, there was no trade school, psychology major, joining the military, or any escape valve. You’d go to a factory and your life would suck as yet another inconsequential peon in some small two bit communist country. These guys have a bad attitude, don’t answer questions, rant about theorems, are intelligible, don’t do examples, and worst of all, make difficult exams that do not correspond with what was taught or what the other professors are teaching. They’re only here for research and upper level courses because in their head they are superior to you, the undergraduate student which forms the foundation of this great institution.</p>
<p>Boca is a case in point, as his ratings jump from “I want to impale him for Calc II” to “what a lovely intelligent creature in math 400.”</p>
<p>American born and bred professors are usually decent, but sometimes, can be annoying. That may have something to do with the fact that intelligence is looked down upon in highschools here, so they are nerdy with symptoms of anti-social behavior and a** hat type antics. They also feel superior, but somewhere down the line some jock kicked their butt and stole their girlfriend, so unlike Boris and Co., they can never really go all the way.</p>
<p>Some American professors can be amazing, Doctor Miles in math is worthy of that title, others, not so. As I said though, you usually can’t go wrong with an American professor, just double check him.</p>
<p>Believe it or not, Asian (usually Chinese, and no I’m not equating Asian with Chinese here, most really are from China) professors have never really failed me. I expected they would be workaholics bent on punishing the inferior American highschool students, like me, for their sick pleasure. Instead, they are thorough in teaching, collect homework on a regular basis, and usually give fair exams. As a matter of fact, my best math professors were both from China. They were still worse than my highschool math teachers in their ability to teach, but I was used to that and they were way better than the other guys. I still get scared if I have an Asian professor because I’m afraid he’ll beat me up with his powers of intelligence, but so far they’ve refrained.</p>
<p>Believe me, my rant may or may not be funny, but at least I give some positives. Some engineering students have anger issues from their years at this fine institution and for them everything is a negative…</p>
<p>If you can take a course that is combined lecture-discussion where a TA teaches it, do it. TAs have consistently been much better at teaching than the professors they represent. So much for those non-sense statistics about how many students are actually taught by professors; you want a TA, believe me. Unless you’re in Eastern Europe, I have friends there and the TAs are also complete a** holes. Eastern European TAs in the USA are fine though; and by the way, ethnicity plays no role as far as I can tell with regards to TA quality.</p>