Awesome Teacher! This was his first time teaching CS1, and he made it an awesome experience! There were many bumps in the highway, but he helped us out along the way (even with covid forcing us online) He shared his “UCF-life” experiences, in terms of when he took CS1.

Awesome Professor here!

This course is taught using C which is used in many other upper year courses in CS like computer organization and operating systems

You might be wondering why I put 1/5 for “easy” but “5/5” for interesting. That’s because Szum is a fantastic professor, but the material itself is absolute murder. The class hinges on the C programming language and math at the level of at least Calculus with Analytical Geometry. With my multiple years of programming experience, I was able to easily do the C programming part but I bombed the math parts of the two exams I took because I had terrible math professors in the past and failed those classes entirely. I had a 70% with a project and an exam still ungraded by the time the withdrawal deadline came around, so I didn’t take my chances and I withdrew from the course. If Szum had graded those two things a little bit faster, I might have stayed in if I was more certain about my grad...read more

Learn math before taking this class. That’s the part that gets you.

Want to figure out if CS is for you? Worried about the Foundation Exam? Just interested in coding? Then this class is for you! Szum’s lectures are awesome and he will prepare you well for the FE (he even used to work for Google!). Be warned though: the learning curve is very steep and things go at a fast pace. You will have to keep yourself in check in order to not fall behind (that means practicing your code/coding parts of your projects nearly every day). Projects are given out every two weeks, so make sure you start them when he hands them out! Even though Szum is very helpful, DO NOT CHEAT AT ALL COSTS! Catching cheaters is Szum’s equivalent to chilling with some Netflix and wine at the end of the day. He’s only this strict since he really wants you to get better at coding and pass th...read more

Again, I recommend starting your projects as soon as they are assigned. When I was in Szum’s class, some kids spent over 20 hours on projects! Luckily though, Szum’s office hours are very helpful and so are the TAs in the Cave! This class is also very math and logic-heavy and that’s the main thing that weeds people out of CS (sadly, myself included). Make sure you brush up on pointers and linked lists as well!

As everyone knows, Szum is an amazing professor. If you have the chance to take ANY class with him, do it! The class involves algorithms and data structures using the C programming language. Algorithms include sorting and backtracking and some stuff with bitwise operators in C. Data structures are Linked Lists, stacks, queues, binary trees, avl trees, hash tables, and maybe a couple others I’m forgetting. Szum will also prepare you really well for the foundation exam if you’re a CS student. Assignments take a long time but are definitely doable. There are a ton of available TAs for help, but personally I prefer Szum‘s office hours.

Start on assignments early, prepare for tests (even if you normally don’t, cuz I normally don’t), don’t he afraid to go to office hours and ask questions.

Szumlanski's class is very difficult, but very vital if you're looking to gain the knowledge you'd actually want for a job in the field. The course has very fair grading, but don't expect to put in no work and get a C. Highly recommend.

Read each assignment's PDF the night it comes out and work on it a little every day. Eustis was down at pivotal moments, so you'd want to be sure to get the assignments done as fast as possible.