Sun, Dennis  

Dr. Sun seems like he's MUCH better for DATA 301 than he is for Stat 350. Pleasant, helpful in office hours, and always answers politely in regards to even basic statistics / python syntax errors. Highly recommend! Do note that this doesn't make the class easy, however. The first lab was Hoffman encoding in Python and it wasn't necessarily the easiest thing to implement especially if you did not know the algorithm beforehand. The second lab is where you really start to do data science related things, and it is not easy, but it is very fun/interesting. All in all, the class is worth taking if you like pythonic thinking and problem solving with it. If you're looking for a pure software development this class is not for you, because the overall focus of the class is extracting data with code, not pushing code into production itself.

Sun made data 301 one of the most interesting CS classes I've ever taken.. 10/10 would recommend. It was challenging but not overwhelming, and there were plenty of opportunities to ask questions and get help if you needed it. He also has industry experience in the field and is a genius.

He runs the class in "reverse classroom" but you end up having to watch lectures and do all the homework at home which is not reverse classroom. He is very very smart but assumes we are all at his Harvard/Stanford education level he his. Nice guy but very ambitious with his material difficultly which takes away from the learning aspect.

I want to give Professor Sun an honest review because I feel like there's a potential a lot of people will just complain, which is justified. I hated him until halfway through the quarter. But I have to take into consideration that it was his first quarter teaching at Poly and he was experimenting with the "reverse classroom" teaching method. First some positives about him. He's very knowledgeable, and in my personal opinion, he explains the content of the class very clearly. It's easy to follow along with his online lectures. Anytime I had difficulty understanding, it was mostly due to the content being difficult in general, but I wouldn't blame it too much on his teaching abilities. He's very helpful in office hours and is extremely enthusiastic about helping you understand. He gave programming assignments which required a little knowledge with Python, but I think he realized too many people in the class struggled with the programming aspect, so he'd always walk you through the code if you visited him in office hours. He doesn't give midterms. Also, he grades everything on effort up until the final which can be good or bad depending on your learning style. From what I've heard, this class is pretty easy with other professors. However, with Sun, you do need to keep up with the class or you'll have a bad time as the class progresses. Here are some things I disliked. He doesn't expect you to do well on his homework or quizzes which was kind of annoying because the questions he asked are confusing and time consuming. I found it annoying that he made programming a part of the class since it's not required according to the course catalog (but this was still a very small part of the class so don't worry too much about it). My biggest issue with him was that he posted dense lecture videos with only two days to complete the homework which was sometimes unnecessarily challenging. He expects you to pause the video and attempt examples before continuing which is extremely time consuming and I simply didn't have time for it (but if you do, I highly suggest that you do this. It's super helpful). Most of the homework I submitted was half-assed and I didn't submit 5 assignments because I simply had no clue how to do them and no time to figure it out(I couldn't attend his office hours earlier in the week). The class material became much easier in the second half of the quarter which made his system work much better. He allowed an unlimited amount of handwritten notes on his final which is honestly the only reason I got an A. Lastly, he knows that we had a lot of complaints with the way he taught the class and is going to take our evaluations very seriously, so the next time he teaches this class it might be structured differently. Hopefully for the better. Good luck!

I don't really understand the reviews below. I honestly thought that the class was pretty good, especially in the second half when the videos and quizzes were adjusted to be shorter. Really hard class but I learned a lot.

Keep this in mind when reading the reviews... There were a few people who kissed up to the professor, they'll write great reviews. Then there's the 10% who just understood all of the material. Then there's the 90% who struggled in the class and hated the way it was taught (initially). Yes, there are no midterms so to speak, but the "quizzes" were 6 questions and 50 minutes long until enough people complained and he changed them to 3 questions and 25 minutes long. Yes, nothing is graded, but don't be fooled - he will take that into account when he submits your grade at the end of the course, regardless of how you do on the final exam. This was supposed to be a reverse classroom structure but it wasn't reverse at all - instead, you watched hour long lecture videos, then worked on incredibly hard homework which could take several hours, oh and at the same time study for the quiz. Somewhere in between there you would also do two programming assignments. This was the most time consuming class I've ever taken. Future students, take the early reviews with a grain of salt because he is rapidly changing things. Next time the final exam will be worth 60% instead of 50%, and he may not allow unlimited notes again. If that was the case I would've failed the class along with a majority of the other students. On a positive note, Dr. Sun is extremely enthusiastic about teaching and wants it to be a good experience for everyone. That goes hand in hand with high expectations. Good luck.

This guy expects you to do two homeworks and a quiz each week. Lecture videos are alright, except when you do the homework and are half clueless. Another thing you should get accustomed to is the x is greater than X. Like that sounds confusing as shittake mushrooms. First week you will be like "I got this bro" then next 7 weeks will be either utter confusion or alright depending on if you are an average no time college student or genius/tryhard with too much time on your hands. Then last 2 weeks you will be like "oh Fourier transforms I have seen this before." You also have to know Python. Overall it was too much work compared to other STAT 350 professors--take this professor if you want to spend extra time really understanding stuff necessary to become a great math student instead of an engineering student. I hope deriving the geometric distribution will come in handy one day when you go to work. Aside from overly heavy math, he is great in office hours. Not sure where he got his definition of reverse classroom from, it was a train wreck. Hopefully next time he teaches this he won't expect us Cal Poly students to be like the Stanford/Harvard tryhards who understanding everything and all the trick questions first try. Maybe he thought that the entire class was had similar understanding to the 3 people in class who could answer all of his in-class questions, thinking we were geniuses. The more useful takeaway of this class is the last few weeks about dtft, noise, autocovariance and random distributions. You will see the same thing in EE 314 and maybe other classes... however, they will reteach it to you so I am not sure what the point of STAT 350 is exactly. Anyways, he is way too tryhard for a new professor, hopefully in 20 years he will get lazier and more laid back instead of grinding a bunch of work. He is a good professor with obvious room for improvement, but I wouldn't recommend him simply because the difficulty and work load you get from his STAT 350 class is a lot lot more than other STAT 350 professors.

Okay. So keep in mind that this was his first class teaching (EVER), and he plans on changing the course a lot to meet student demand/learning styles. The first half of this class was a nightmare. It was 1 hour lecture videos twice a week and then a huge quiz once a week. The material was pure probability and statistics and he moved very quickly through it when most of us were learning this for the first time. However, he paid attention to student feedback and then dialed back the pace considerably for the second half of the quarter. Videos became 5-20 minutes long, quizzes were half as long and involved working through solutions. This part dealt with signal processing (think EE 228/328 stuff), so it was a lot easier in general because most of us had just come off of 228 and had studied it before. What I think sort of happened is that he assumed we would be familiar with the pure probability part and wouldn't know the signal processing part, when in reality it was the opposite, and that's just something to fix for next time. The final was EXTREMELY fair. Long, but fair. There was homework due, as mentioned before, but it was graded by effort. There was no midterm. The one questionable part were the python labs. Almost all of us have never programmed in python, but if you went to his office hours he would pretty much give you the answers. As for his personality, Dennis is an AWESOME guy. He's still young and full of hope for students, which is a refreshing change from all the bitter profs in the EE department. All in all, for these reviews I would pay attention to his personality and teaching ability more than any other bitterness. The structure of the class, which is the part that most people hated, will change with time. So I think he's worth it, but maybe in a few quarters when he has more stuff figured out.

Professor Sun has changed a lot about the structure of this class from when he first taught it and I think he's done a great job! It is still reverse classroom, but his lecture videos are great and very straightforward. He also has almost two full class periods to work on HW in class and get help. I think the best change he's made to the course is to focus more on probability over things like the Fourier transform because he recognizes that EE's are going to be less familiar with probability. There's 1-2 lecture videos and activities 4 nights a week that take 45 mins max, weekly homework and two midterms. He heavily weighs the final (50%) but if you've done fine in the class so far then its a breeze. Lots of extra credit opportunity.