Professor Jay is a very friendly person, but is only a decent professor compared to Jennifer Nordby that taught the first half of fall quarter. Professor Jay is very scatterbrained and quite confusing during lecture. She was not very clear and almost seemed scared of the class at times. She basically never taught either, as 75% of the lectures were just guest speakers that repeated the same thing as the previous guest speaker. The material was interesting and easy, just not really taught. Everyone was confused how the final could be 60% material that she taught and 40% from the midterm/previous professor, as none of us really learned anything from Professor Jay. She also performed several experiments during lecture but they never really worked or went as she hoped. Her final was not very difficult, but she did ask a few weird questions that threw everyone off. Overall, Professor Jay is not horrible, but she is just not as good as the other professors in the food cluster.

Really fast talker, unclear in presentations. Overall difficulty isn't very hard though

While I really enjoyed the first half of this course taught by Professor Nordby, I disliked the second half taught by Professor Jay. Jay undoubtedly is an expert in her field and has done a lot of interesting research on the topics she discussed, but her lectures often did not represent her knowledge. She always appeared very scatterbrained and relatively unorganized, and did not construct slides and presentations that would be beneficial to students' learning. I found her lecture style too fast-paced, as she often skimmed over vital material, and her slides usually consisted of large block quotations from readings and other researchers' studies.

She did attempt to occasionally make the lectures more interesting by including interactive class-participation and experiments, but these often felt unnecessary. Overall, it was difficult to ascertain what I actually was supposed to have learned in her part of the course when it came time to study for the final, and the materials she provided to students were not extremely helpful. Professor Jay is a sweet, bubbly professor, but she did not really effectively "teach" the course.