Chen, Katherine  

Dr. Chen is... well to put it bluntly, a hardass. She expects a ton of hours to be put into her classes, and labs (except for 215) are rediculous! She is a smart lady, but expects you to not only understand material presented in class, but to apply it on tests (with minimal explination of the thing you are actually applying it TO). I put a rediculous amount of time into the class I most recently took from her, and got a C. I was just mad because my other grades suffered severely from taking a class with her (not that I had a choice). I undersand that she wants us to be able to think on our own, but the truth of the matter is we are friggin students and we just learned all this stuff! How can she really expect us to apply it when we have had no real-world experience!? She is just a very difficult teacher... my reccommendation to all non-MATE majors is to take someone else.

Dr. Chen I can't keep getting mad at London anymore. It's your fault he's here, the entire junior series talks about how fucked up he is as a teacher, and as a person. Watching London and Harding operate is like reading a Goofus and Gallant cartoon strip. Guess which one is Goofus? I wish to god I had London for MatE 210. I would have known to get out of this major. It is disgusting and horrible that you have London hiding in the junior series. I love Material Engineering, but man, I simply hate London. If I had known I would have to take an entire year of him, I would have simply been a different major. So Chen since you ignore our student-teacher evaluations I post this here. As my only way of getting back at the department.

What else is there to say? Fine person, nothing interesting. Class was meh... Blah, blah, blah... Fine person.

If you are a MATE definately take this teacher because she will certainly make you know the subject to the extent that you need to know. If you are any other major (ie. I'm talking to EE's and CPE's etc.) then take Orling if at all possible. Chen makes you memorize all the useless MATE equations and then always tries to trick you on quizzes and tests. She gives chapter overviews, but she makes sure that her exam questions can not be answered with only that knowledge. She wants you to use certain words in your answers and if you don't, she docks you because you know the material but aren't "digging as deep" as she wants you to. She says that you should read along in the book, which is also just a waste of time. Then we had a useless material selection group project to do which wasn't worth much of our grade anyway, but took up WAY to much of our dead week study time. And on to the final, it was very long and was exactally like the stupid little "mini quizzes" and "quizzes" that she gave us before. THAT would have been nice to know before hand, huh? She brought us cookies twice as if we would all change our mind from all the bad things that we thought of her. I don't want her f-ing cookies. So to wrap this up...If you are a MATE or like looking at teachers asses (see below comment) take Chen....otherwise DO NOT TAKE CHEN.

Chen's great. Fun to look at and fun to listen to. She's a tough cookie on quiz grading: be sure to answer questions as completely as possible, with lots of words.

Professor Chen is definetly not the best or the worst teacher you can get for MATE 210. While I think she is a little more difficult than the other teachers the class is still pretty much a breeze. I spent maybe an hour or two a week studying for this class and that was very adequate. She gives weekly quizzes, which seem tough, but in the end for us she dropped 3 out of 8 of them. Now that is a pretty good curve. She has two midterms which are easier and nothing to be sweated. The final wasn't too bad. In the end she is a pretty decent teacher and I think all of the other teachers use her powerpoint slides for their lectures.

I would rather drink bleach then have to take this class with Chen again. The quiz questions were absurdly specific and difficult to prepare for. In addition the answers were often subjective or just wrong. The assignments were completely pointless and out of place. Having the class at 7am was the cherry on top of the giant pile of shit that is Mate 210.

First of all, this bitch is so extra. She makes this supposedly simple intro course way more difficult than it needs to be. She gives weekly quizzes that averaged 50-75% due to misleading and super specific questions. Lecture was easily the most boring class i've ever taken. Find a different profession, Kathy, those 9 years of you not teaching was the best for everyone.

Try to avoid Chen for this class. She is all over the place and never seems very organized. Her quiz and test questions are worded very poorly and oftentimes even if you knew the material, the way it was presented confused you.

Talk about attractive- she has a cute butt which really adds to how cool MATE 215 is. The labs were really fun and easy. I'd take her for anything.

prof chen is pretty tough. she likes things in a certain way, but she does let you redo things if you just totally get it wrong. be sure to not forget anything for lab or she'll dock you points. overall its an easy class with no final so its really not that bad.

She is helpful in answering your questions, and she really wants you to learn the material and do well. Sometimes she is not clear on the what kind of answer she is looking for on her lab worksheets. She is always looking for twice as much explanation than the question really asks for. Other than that, she's a good lab teacher and doesn't leave you in the dark. She stops by your group every 20 mins or so to see if you have any questions, and if you study for the final getting an A in the class isn't all that hard.

Good teacher, Good class. No final. With a little out of class work, it should be an easy A (or at least a B).

Good lab instructor to have! She is highly interactive with the students. If you have a question, she's ready to help. She won't just give you the answer, but she will lead you to finding the answer yourself. This make it so you have to learn and understand the material. It was an easy A. Plan on spending the full 3 hours in lab almost every week though.

Prof Chen communicates what is expected very clearly and makes the lab interesting and fun! I would retake her again if I get the opportunity!

Chen's a good teacher for lab. There is a verbal lab quiz before each lab, but as long as you read the lab you'll do fine. In mate 215, every group does a different lab from each other. I have no clue how she grades the labs, but I think she's pretty lenient. I'm not a MATE major, so I didn't really find interest in this class, but she tried to help us understand it. Sometimes though, when you ask her a question, she'll ask you a question about your question and avoid answering it. There's no final. There are only 8 labs, so you get out a week early.

This class on nano/ethics is such a joke. I feel like such a fucking lab rat in this major, like they're constantly trying out new classes on us, and always getting it wrong. In this class you learn basically nothing new. You read a lot of boring opinionated articles that tangentially relate to materials engineering, if at all. The best part (only good part) of this class were the guest lecturers who came and really made it easy to see that any other major would have better and more interesting teachers. Dr. Chen grades harshly, unless you go to her office once, in which case your shit is golden. All her powerpoints are posted on blackboard, thank god, otherwise I would have actuallly had to try and extract meaning from the endless stream of random, unorganized information that was "taught" to us at every "lecture." I would say avoid her, but like any other mate class, there's usually no choice.

Dr. Chen is very knowledgeable and knows her stuff better than a lot of the teachers in the MATE department. She is a great lab instructor and helps students tremendously in lab. That being said, her teaching style for lectures needs to change. She is clearly very out of touch with the students. She assigns ridiculous amounts of homework that are absolutely unnecessary for an ethics class, with complete disregard for the other classes students have and how busy their schedules may be. Her lectures are straight off the power point, with perhaps the only cool part being the items she passes around. The lectures are dry and hard to follow. The readings she posts on Blackboard usually consist of extremely opinionated articles that are very difficult to read. She is very uptight and doesn\'t show much personality in class. This shows especially in her grading as she grades students down on anything and everything, without any tolerance for small mistakes. If she doesn\'t see exactly what she wants to see, almost verbatim, then it\'s partially or entirely wrong. Again, Dr. Chen is very knowledgeable and clearly intelligent, and I would recommend her as a lab instructor, but the way she teaches and grades in lecture is a huge discouragement to students and makes students lose interest in the material. A reduction in the amount of busy work and adding some humor into the lectures would make her teaching a lot better. If you have a busy schedule with a lot of work in other classes and you have any choice at all when it comes to teachers for this class or another lecture (which isn\'t likely if you\'re a MATE), then try to avoid her class.

Chen knows a lot about materials and is knowledgable in the field. She's very open to discussion during class and office hours. In order to get a good grade in her classes, you need to think outside the box and write more than the average answer on her midterms. That being said, she is a harsh grader on midterms and lab reports. She stated that she's one of the reviewers for peer reviewed articles, and I feel that she uses those articles as a basis for grading. It's hard to fight for points back and she grades based on what other people right. She'll take off points for putting the correct description but not naming the process. Her lectures are dry and she expects you to know detailed descriptions of slides gone over in a few minutes. This class barely covers ethics and history of materials. It's more on nanotechnology, alloys, and steel. Be prepared to do a lot of reading and studying and a good amount of homework every week.

Chen. Expect to lose points for everything, whether it be relevant or irrelevant. Preparing for her tests are more of figuring out the exact wording she wants for a question, inserting as many buzz words as possible. She will warn against "shotgunning," or saying everything you can think of, yet she will grade you down for not enough information. In short, even if you know every little detail about all of the concepts in class, you will not get an A on any of the tests.

I spent more time studying for these tests than for any other tests that I've ever taken in my life, and got lower scores on these tests than I've gotten on any other tests in my life. Somehow ended up with an A... god knows that curve must have been pretty ridiculous at the end. This class was pretty much a mix of 1000000 completely unrelated topics. I guess you could say it was fun? The homework was due weekly and was 2-4 different 1-2 page long reports on some articles about nanotechnology. This was one of the few classes that I have ever taken here in which I did not look forward to attending

never seems impressed with what we do and is kinda condescending. Midterms are hard. the average was a 55 on one of them

basically r/shittyrobots

Dr. Chen is a good professor and knows a lot about what she is teaching. I mean she got her Ph.D. at MIT for crying out loud. She is, however, not very helpful at times when you ask her questions (esp. from homework) because she wants us to figure out the problems on our own/with our classmates. But if you show her some of your work, she is very helpful and may even let you see her answers if you ask. The other thing is that she doesn't know exactly what she wants sometimes. for example, one homework assignment had us find a read a few research paper/journal articles and we were supposed to write about it. I put in a lot of work but it ended up only worth 3 points. Her test are generally half calculations and half written responses, very similar to the ones in MatE 220. I felt she emphasized much more on interputation of numerical answers now rather than just getting to the number (that's the too difficult anyways since you get an equation sheet, though it does not really cover all the equations used in the class, the rest you need to derive (quite easily done) from what's given). As for the lecture, you probably got it at MatE 220 also: she writes stuffs on the board and talk about them and you copy them down. She sometimes ask the same questions again and again to make sure you understand some basic concepts, they are important but can get annoying. As for the lab, she doesn't give you the cook book instructions anymore, nor should you expect it. she does guide you towards the general direction. this should've started back with london in mechanical behaviors, so it should be no surprise to you. in conclusion, if you are taking MatE 405, you are probably a MATE and don't have a choice in the teacher. And you probably had her in MatE 220, she's pretty much the same, with only a stronger emphasis on the figuring things out on your own.

Uptight and devoid of any personality

This was an experimental class, that ended up covering so much interesting stuff. Dr. Chen included a ton of cool topics, that I didnt know anything about, and made it really fun to learn. She structured her class differently than a typical lecture- with no tests or hw, only reading (lots), presentations, and reports. She let us choose our own research topics so that it was interesting to us, and was really good about class participation and discussions. I would recommend her and this class to anyone, even non-MATEs.