0 2026/notesHi! I wanted to publish some notes for the classes I’ve taken this year for no particular reason. If you’re curious what the first year of an engineering major is like at UW, here are my short reviews for some of the classes I took. Honestly though, I might not be the most unbiased source out there…
MATH 380: Computational Algebraic Geometry - Cynthia Vinzant, Spring 2026. As you’d expect, this is a very cool class. The central thing is Groebner Bases, and the course is built around “Ideals, Varieties, and Algorithms” by Cox, Little, and O’Shea. Very similar vibe to info theory honestly, though with more emphasis on proof-based math (as expected). To the surprise of nobody, this is probably my favorite class I took this year. Prof Vinzant’s lectures were really really good, introducing a concept and working through sufficient detail to build to a neat payoff.
\mathbb F_q / \langle x^n - 1\rangle. I walk through the theory of error correcting codes using Hamming(7,4) as an example, working through how to encode and decode, and what errors are correctable.STAT 390: Intro to Statistics for Engineers - Caren Marzban, Winter 2026. Surprisingly, this is probably my second favorite class (though honestly the bar is set so low with the other classes I’ve been taking). The focus of this class was just on how to run statistical tests correctly, and we did some programming in R in our quiz sections. There was little focus on theory, but I honestly think you need to be thinking in terms of conditional probabilities and probability distributions for this class to make sense. Prof Marzban was very passionate and a good lecturer, but I did feel that he was very much just teaching to the test, as to be expected for a class aimed at engineers (derrogatory).
Miscellenous classes, including:
MATH 327: Real Analysis - Matthew Conroy, Spring 2026. Prof Conroy was a funny guy (shoutout pickle5@uw.edu), but the curriculum of this intro to analysis class left a lot to be desired. Honestly, this is probably because I knew like 90% of the material beforehand, but also we didn’t even touch on differentiability at all! Very basic class, very introductory.
MATH 300: Intro to Proofs - Farbod Shokrieh, Winter 2026. Not much to say, it is a very basic, very introductory intro to proofs class. Why did they make me take this? :(
PHYS 143: Waves & Fake Quantum Physics - Miguel Morales, Spring 2026. I did NOT enjoy this class. This was an experiment though, and it was the first time they were trying to teach some quantum mechanics with this class. However, literally everything was “we can’t get into that because we don’t know the math— take PHYS 225 if you want to learn more”. What was the point? Mostly vibes (of the type ‘omg, both a particle and a wave’ or ‘omg, the cat is both dead and alive’), not much real, serious physics. It is a good pop-sciency intro to get people excited about the subject, but it was not a real class. Homeworks and labs/tutorials were also not great. The labs were boring and formulaic— we unironically did ‘how does the length of a string affect its resonant frequency’, and all of the labs were on that level. The level of ‘lab report’ was also just busywork: fill in this template, and pick a conclusion from either ‘data is consistent with our model’ or ‘data rejects our model’. The homework/tutorial questions were horribly written too, where they are obviously tring to get you to do this one specific thing but also obfuscating it by being ambiguous and confusing. It does not teach you to do the physics, but to metagame and guess what physics the question wants you to do. If you guess wrong, you are just screwed. Maybe all the intro the physics classes here are like that though, as this is the only 100 level physics class I have taken.
MATH 207: Differential Equations - Guillermo Sanmarco, Winter 2026. Differential equations for engineers. About what you’d expect, but it was really funny that this was honestly just a strict subset of victor adler’s diffeq class at harker.
Other classes I took:
I also did a lot of lean4 this year with the UW Math AI lab and at the Lean Hackathon.