Smilkstein, Tina  

By far the worst professor I\'ve come across at Cal Poly. Shes completely unorganized, bad at explaining new principals, and she thinks we LIVE for her class. She spends half the lecture time explaining the easiest sh*t in detail, literally BEGGING your mind to wander, and all of a sudden she\'ll throw in something REALLY important and jump right past it. She can\'t read her own computer screen, and has the class help her every 5 minutes trying to find the right powerpoint presentation (out of the 50 windows she has up). Her method of teaching is GOD AWEFUL. In an attempt to teach us VHDL (a low level programming language), she showed us a screen shot and pretty much said \"and thats what it looks like\". It seems like she sends a new email EVERY DAY. The due dates change on a regular basis and if you don\'t understand something in the homework because you don\'t remember her going over it, let me say you SHOULDN\'T WORRY. Most likely, she will send you an email at 10:00 PM the night before its due cancelling those problems and/or extending the due date. Here\'s a screen shot of my email from HER ALONE: http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/8973/tinaemails.jpg She somehow once sent me an email intended for one of her colleagues. Subject was \"blurb\" and attached was an assignment about some INSANELY complicated elder care stuff. I spent an hour trying to figure out what it was before giving up and emailing her back. One time, we even showed up to her 8:00-11:00 AM lab and wondered where she was, read our emails, and found out that at 7:05, she sent us all emails cancelling lab because she SLEPT IN. This is her first quarter at Cal Poly, but I can honestly say that I think she should be fired. Only about 5 kids in class seem to like her. Bottom line: this professor is absolutely f*cking terrible.

Smilkstein is good at describing something if you can pin her down and ask it specifically. Due dates will constantly change, there will be very few total labs, but they will be long and difficult. She didn't realize her midterm had unrealistic expectations (no one finished the simulation in class), and had to make it a take home. I spent all of the intervening days up until the due date trying to figure out a solution and make it work with the schematic symbols, and it eventually did not work. Still haven't received that midterm grade weeks later (though understandable with the amount of finite state machine logic and diagrams in there). Instead of using the Meally labs, Smilkstein made her own. I described the current one to a couple friends in 233, and they said that it was on par with what they were doing. This can be a good or bad thing. If there is ANYONE else, take them. If not, just take her. It's better than being delayed graduating. She is very nice and helpful, but the class is not well designed in my humble opinion. I hope this review helps someone decide whether or not to take her.

shes a nice lady but this class was so unorganized. we did absolutely nothing for the first 3 weeks. she didn't fail us so that was good but we didnt learn anything either so...

Bad at explaining the material. Expect yourself to be doing work on material that you have no idea on. Workload per week is just too much. Expect yourself to be working on the homework for this professor more than your other classes. Avoid at all cost.

I don't know why students are complaining about not completing tasks on time. Deadlines are tough to meet. This is to be expected. After all, you are enrolled in one of the top Egnineering Schools in the Country. Whow knows? You may be the next Burt Rutan. Anyways, quit whining. I guarantee you that you boss/Manager/CEO will not be happy if you don't complete your project on time. specially, if your getting paid a huge salary. What did I learn? I learned about the assembly language program, and how to design a MIPS processor.

Are you serious this professor was ok at lecture a few error here and there. But the lectures were pretty solid. Disorganized at most times and in my opinion she took way too long to explain simple material and went too quickly on memory. Not enough time spent on memory and it came up on the final. 1/3 of the score in the final is memory which we spent half a day on. Overall a pretty ok teacher, but of course there are those who would spend hours and hours studying for this one class only to make the rest of the class look bad.

I do not to kiss up to a prof to earn a good grade unlike the person below me who spent so much time working on the lab. If this is the only class I was taking then I would be happy to spend hours and hours working on a lab that was barely explained, but no. Stop lying to students. What we want is the truth not lies.

I did not enjoy Professor Smilkstein's class at all. She took ages to respond to e-mails despite our multiple attempts to get her help. The final project was painfully bland and poorly unexplained. I'm sure she cared more about her dog and her dirty pants than her students.

I had her for lecture and lab, and I always thought Smilkstein had something interesting to add to the subject. I definitely welcomed her tangents and she has some interesting stuff to say outside of class too. If you're willing to really learn and put in some effort she'll bend over backwards to help you. She hosted study sessions and fed us pizza, went to bed at some crazy hours of the morning so she could try to grade the some of the ridiculously bad shit we produced and be on skype in case one of us dragged our sorry asses online to get help... whenever we wanted it. Engage yourself, the woman needs the feedback. Its not an easy class but you'll live.

I took Dr. Braun for EE306 and Tina for EE307. To sum it all up Dr braun will find 30 seconds left in class and derive math previously proven impossible through sheer force of will. You will leave his class knowing nothing and thinking you comprehend the universe. Tina on the other hand will spend half the class in story time mode, jump through half a dozen subjects in no particular order and suddenly realize she held the class an extra three minutes through hilarious chaos and curiosity. You will leave her class thinking you know nothing only to find weeks later you learned all you will ever need to know. And much much more. Seriously Tina's stories are worth every second you spend on the insande homework.

Tina belongs up there with the top tier professors: DePiero, Prodanov, Pilkington, Shaban, Nafisi, and Taufik. This class was so fundamentally different from the other EE classes, sit in if you wanna see why... While the homework project was a pain, the amount of LTSpice used in this major just ramps from there (having her for 347 lab too helped a lot). This class is my favorite EE class, probably because things just made sense. I remember what she said on the first day: "You all should be rewarded for having made it this far." Tina is bomb