This class was the only class that I took at UVA that I felt like was not worth my tuition or my time. Professor Doryab is surely a nice person, but not a good teacher. Every lecture is immensely monotone, boring, and all she does is read off the slides and code to an audience of 200 students. One redeeming quality of the class is that the labs are quite useful and would come in handy to anyone trying to use SQL in their work later on

The class itself consists of a midterm (extremely hard, but curved) and a final, as well as 3 extra credit opportunities, labs, and a semester long project worht 30% of your grade

Overall, I completely understand having this class as a requirement for the Systems Engineering major, but couldn't UVA find a slightly better lecturer?

These concepts in this class are a great introduction to database management and ways to manage information. I am hesitant to say this about the class itself because the course could definitely be improved. It was very hard to find things about the class in the Syllabus, so there were a lot of surprises throughout the semester. The mix of lectures and labs during the week was for completion, and only a certain number of each were needed, but if you miss any of these, it's pretty difficult to get any info from the lectures. The class is focused on the concepts of data management, which rely heavily on your ability to program. There are a lot of online coding courses assigned that are almost never talked about during class. It made the connections between coding and the concepts harder. Professor Doryab understands the content well but doesn't do a great job of conveying both the content and class expectations. We spent the first semester coding in MySQL, and then for the second half we coded in Python. This was annoying because the entirety of the final project was coded in Python. I think this class is important for understanding data management, but I wouldn't recommend it for anyone not in Systems Engineering.

This class was poorly ran and just overall very disorganized. It’s not a super difficult class, but this semester the class time was truly a complete waste almost. The final project rubric was not given to us in a timely manner and it wasn’t exactly clear how the grading worked for the final project which was 30% of the grade.

Wouldn't recommend taking it with Prof. Doryab. She is nice enough and reasonably knowledgeable about the course content, but the structure this semester was pretty frustrating. A lot of the expectations about assignments weren't clearly communicated, lecture wasn't really helpful (did most of the learning through Hadley Wickham's R4DS book), and the class structure kept changing through the middle of the semester. I personally didn't get too much value out of the assignments this semester, but overall I did end up learning a fair bit about how to program in R, I guess. The project was long and took a lot of time (and similarly the rubric for it didn't exist until like a week after it began.) However, maybe some of these things will be smoothed out in later iterations - I think this is only her second time teaching the course, and it was over Zoom, as well. Basically, the course just felt very disorganized. That was the main difficulty, the actual content of the course isn't too hard to grasp.