UVA Professor Chat

I saw some discussions about UVA professors in a few threads…

Curious if anyone remembers any of these… and I was SEAS, so they’ll be all Engineering profs…

Mary Price - Calculus - she had as close to a photographic memory that I have ever seen. She knew everyone’s name in our Calc 101 class (~100) by the second class… she was the sole reason I stayed in the E-School

Vera Grandlund - Calculus - terrible… I think she liked putting questions on tests that even she didn’t know the answer to… one time I got a B+ on a test, I had only gotten 9 points out of 100, but she gave everyone 10 points for showing up to class the week after the test, so I got a 19, which curved up to a B+

Worthy Martin - Algorithms - Dude was a flat out genius but could not teach his genius to us because he didn’t get that everyone else wasn’t a genius. My final in his Algorithms class was take-home, 5-questions… took me 60 hours. :frowning:

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I avoided Grandlund and she was the Cruella of Calculus when I was matriculating. Absolutely horrible teacher and maybe intentionally so for weeding out purposes.

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Prof. Kett told me my “expository skills are lacking.” Whatever, dude, looks like I got the last laugh on that one. One of us is a retired professor, and one of us spends all day drafting extemporaneous expository essays on the internet (i.e., posting on message boards).

(in all honesty, his class – something about US intellectual and cultural history – was super interesting.)

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Boom! Case closed.

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Professor Edith Turner- She taught “Shamanism” an Anthropology course, which was really cool. We laid on the ground and she played this drum circle for about 20-30 minutes and did this guided meditation in which we went on a spiritual journey. It was pretty awesome.

I tried to get into Ecom with Elzinga, but it was *always packed, so couldn’t get in there.

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I took Elzinga’s class… I wasn’t impressed.

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Dr Fred deal an absolute legend. He let some of the athletes sneak into his 6 or 700 level biology course that was couple weeks in San Salvador Bahamas. Incredible experience and the man worked hard played hard. Getting genus species of random coral Life and snorkling in 2000 foot water was wild shit. Anyone take that class?

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Lol ok that’s good to know…I ended up taking the Ecom course with this TA named Haimanot Teferra (I still remember her name to this day), and the course was terrible.

First year I took a Calculus course as I originally was trying to get into McIntire…I forget the TA’s name, she *knew her stuff but couldn’t *teach it.

sounds like a perfect class after a bong rip (if you are into that kind of thing).

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Oh wow, that’s awesome…I wish I had heard of him…there are so many other courses that “If I could do it over again” would have taken, but there was so much out there.

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Y’all went to class?

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Lol we had our phases…this professor was literally 80 years old when I took the class so it was amazing that she was able to manage our classroom of 30-40 people. At that time she must have had 7-8 books too.

Not on Fridays if I could help it. Thursdays were always at risk too.

Don’t want to get too controversial but personally think Elzinga is not a terribly great dude. I’ll see if I can find it again, but he has written papers about using office hours to evangelize which I think is antithetical to the university. He’s also not really a researcher anymore. There are so many phenomenal courses with legit frontier economists and all people can talk about is elzinga.

Edit here:

I had him in '86 … he was solid then but I agree the hype didn’t match the teaching.

This is like 25+ years old gripe, but I wasn’t a fan of the Econ dept’s approach to the 101 class. Your choice was either 500+ person class in the Fall (with every “try hard” in sight camped out for office hours), or a 30ish person class with a TA trying to learn how to teach on the fly. I picked a TA, too, and had similar results. Seems something in between those two extremes might have been better.

At least as of a few years ago, he was available for hire to argue against any sort of antitrust enforcement, but yes, I also shouldn’t get too controversial, but probably already have (sorry)

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Yes he is a consultant for Cornerstone Research, an econ consulting shop, where he makes $1000 an hour as other people write reports for him to read in trials.

(Not that there is anything at all wrong with this industry both parties in trials need expert witnesses)

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My CS101 TA… can’t remember his name, but he was from the Far East… impossible to understand… came over to me one day and lurked over my shoulder until I turned around…

He used his fingers to pretend like he was typing on a keyboard in the air and asked me… “you like computer like?” WTF?

Edit: My lab partner at the time… anytime I run into him since then… the first thing he does is walk up to me and pretend to type on a keyboard and ask me “you like computer like?” LOL! That scarring an experience.

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All you need to know about econ 101 is that I demand another commitment and @HoozGotNext refuses to supply one.

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Is it a unilateral or concerted refusal to deal?