If you are a part of an engineering club that uses CAD, you will probably be a little bored in this class. If you are not and have no CAD experience, it will probably be a bit confusing at first. This class was a bit disorganized and the professor was hard to reach. I personally relied on the TA to clarify things, but it seemed like the TA and the Professor didn't communicate much. That being said, as long as you do your work, which can be a lot at times, you will do well in this class.

Class felt super disorganized, I often had very little idea on exactly what the expectations were for each assignment. I also generally just felt a lack of clear communication between the professor and TA. The grading is relatively lenient, though, so that makes up for not knowing what is even expected. I would also come into this class with a group prepared for the final project, because if you don't have one they don't even prompt you to start communicating with your group, and there isn't any class time dedicated to that, you just have to figure it out.

Take Gao! He is a very engaging and straightforward professor. However be warned--this class is very work heavy. We had lecture exercises, homework, and lab due pretty much every week along with the final project. The homework definitely took a long time because you had to do a lot of drawing and googling--not hard but just very tedious and took many hours. The labs were very helpful but also pretty time-consuming. The finals project took the most time by far--our report ended up being almost 100 pages. But overall, I learned a lot about Solidworks and the basics of engineering design. Gao explained things very well and taught a lot of concepts. As long as you do your work, you should get a good grade.