Sophomore physics lab
The experiments are really interesting. Most of the hard work (designing, building, making sure what you see is what you think you see, etc.) in the experiments are done already, so the students can just enjoy the most rewarding part. So, although the experiments might seem intimidating at the beginning, they are not hard at all. Plus there is a lot of Mathematica programs to help analyzing data, which make things very easy. Just press the button and the program works perfectly.
I really hoped that there are some equivalent introductory lab classes back in my undergraduate days. We didn't have to take lab classes until the third year, but then all of a sudden we had to learn everything. It takes time to figure out what is going on; it certainly isn't ideal this way. We had to learn the basics of data analysis and at the same time learnthe theory of the experiments which requires quantum mechanics, which, most of us are still taking.
It's nice to be a student. Being a TA, it's not that nice. In the first half of the term, we have to learn all the experiments before the students do them. And in the other half, novelty wears off. It's just a matter of repeating the same thing again and again. Fortunately the equipment works fine, generally. There are a couple of old computers that might be worrisome at times. One of the experiments need a computer with win98 installed, and we run dos programs on it. Since the computer is old, not all the hardware is compatible with it. If one do certain operation (as advised on screen), the computer will just freeze, and we have to restart the whole thing. Yet another one is an old computer with MSDOS as the main operating system. Network is not working. To retrieve files, one have to use a 3'5'' floppy drive (usually known as the A:\ drive) to copy the files to another computer. I wonder if they have seen floppy disks at all. And then do the analysis somewhere else. It's kind of fun to see the antiques working properly.
