Pretty useless. Pointless course readings.

Avoid Schandorf like the plague if you are in Engineering & want time to do something cool like join a design team & do sth amazing like build a prototype of a robot. Design team is 10-12 hrs per wk & you get fantastic hands-on experience. BUT, Schandorf doesn't care. Selfishly monopolizes your time by demanding many draft rewrites & unnecessary readings.

Schandorf relishes opportunity to leverage power over students by making them run around like hungry chihuahuas hunting for food scraps by making them re-do MANY successive draft proposals under the guise of learning. Real reason: he likes to sit back & smirk while watching students sweat like pigs while compiling another unnecessary draft proposal

Avoid. Michael Schandorf's Words 150 class is for science & STEM students. These students are eager to start prestigious & lucrative careers in medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, computer science, engineering in Silicon Valley etc...and don't really care about Words 150. Schandorf knows this & tries to force students into making Words 150 their top priority class by deliberately overloading students with an overwhelming amount of busy work to occupy all their time so they can't focus on the class that they are actually interested in such as chemistry, biology, physics, applied science....the courses that will actually move them forward into their desired careers.

I’m not sure why everyone complains about this course, I found it easy and useful, I went to every class which I think is the key to success

If you’re interested in going into research or anything including academic writing this is a great intro course into that. I found it very useful

Dr baumvol was great. She was very easygoing and funny, and if you came to her for help she was more than happy to help you.

Actually go to class. Many people skip class thinking they can do all the assignments at home but you need the prof to give you advice while you’re working on assignments in class.

It's a course that everyone needs to take, let's face it. It's really painful, but Jennifer Cowe is a good prof and nice. Marks HARD tho. I appreciated how there weren't too many assignments, b/c there's a lot of things going on for everyone and writing is hard. And her topic is nostalgia which I enjoyed to a certain extent.

WRDS 150 is a VERY HARD CLASS. Find a good prof AND A GOOD TOPIC THAT YOU'LL BE INTERESTED IN. Be aware that it's subject to change too. Try to see if anyone's taken that prof before, you could get some good info. And take it as early as possible to get it done and over with!

Suffering but helpful.

Dr. Cowe expects her students to have the ability to accomplish the assignments (including the final paper) by referring to several advices she gave in the syllabus. Better choose another professor's WRDS 150 or other first year ENGL course if you are not confident about your ability of writing while you care about your average.