I think the actual material is straightforward and fun, but this professor as opposed to the other professors who usually teach this class, has made it very demanding. He has quizzes every week and has us replicate each of his lectures and at any moment says he can ask for them (which he has). He also has pop quizzes and will quiz you on old and recent material so if you get behind in this class, the work just keeps piling up. Quizzes can be 2 questions at least and if you get one wrong, a simple question about maybe the volume of the part, boom you just got a 50% on the quiz and the quizzes are overall 40% of your grade.... He is a hardass for sure.

SolidWorks

He is a hardass for sure. More in my overall course comments.

To not take it with Rubiano!

What should be an interesting class harmed by weird structure. For this online class, Rubiano makes you watch weird, over-condensed YouTube videos he's created instead of actual lectures. 100% of your grade is exams and it's very easy to slip up and fail due to the lack of HW cushion. Really weird process where you solve example youtube videos and then do homework in an excel spreadsheet. Really high workload and super annoying. By the end of the course if you hear specific enthalpy or isentropic one more time, your brain will leak out of your ears.

Introduction to thermodynamics from an engineering perspective. Work, heat, internal energy, enthalpy, and entropy in open and closed systems. Engineering devices and heat engines are discussed. Majority of the course focuses on determining how energy flows around in various systems. I love the content and would enjoy taking it with a competent professor.

Rubiano was maybe the worst professor I have ever had. Truly, truly lazy and unprofessional. Refused to actually lecture or communicate to students, had insane expectations for work (i.e. expecting meticulously formatted excel files for every homework problem that you will be asked to open during exams and modify with almost no time allotted, so any alternative solution methods you use for homework will give 0 points), and makes your life as hard as possible. Office hours rely on the student to schedule but he's consistently unavailable when you reach out and won't ever explain things/post solutions outside of them.

If this is a Summer C course online for you, take it some other way. This is probably one of the first big boy engineering classes MechEs take, so give yourself the biggest advantage possible. If you do have the misfortune of taking it with him, REVIEW REVIEW REVIEW. Thermo is so finnicky and you have to know so many slightly different methods of problem solving for different scenarios, so familiarity and consistency are your friends. Good luck.