Sam is a good teacher and I enjoyed the lecture portion of this class. Homework is long and difficult, and weighted very heavily, which is pretty frustrating because it was hard to schedule around. I did really poorly on one homework (that I think everyone found difficult) and I think that lowered my grade significantly. That said, the high homework weight means you probably won't fail. Treat the homeworks like mini midterms and do not save them for the last minute! The tests were pretty straightforward, I thought the final was a little challenging but not too difficult. Sam is very clear and lectures well. Everything else seemed pretty standard for online lecture courses. I definitely recommend having your camera on from the start, as I think he values that and will take more time to work with you/answer your questions if he thinks you participate. I thought he could get a little short with people that he didn't think were actually interested in the class (but I guess he gets a lot of people trying to use him for letters of rec and such so it's kind of understandable).

This was taken during COVID. Sam was a great lecturer, and really cares a lot about his students. This class comes with a preface of being one of the hardest Mech&AE undergrad courses, but it actually wasn't that bad. Sam really makes sure that you learn everything you need to know. He is extremely helpful in office hours, and his office hours often helped me much more in 15 minutes that the entire discussion session did (and I felt our TA was also really good). The one downside to this class is the workload. Sam likes to assign hard problems for homework and these homeworks took up more time than homework from any other class. With that said, his midterm and final had questions that were similar to the homeworks, but often made to take much less time. I didn't feel unprepared when it came to the midterm and final.