Professor Marek may have taught me some of the most practical lessons I'll learn in my undergraduate education at UCLA. We dealt with optimal purchasing strategies in auctions and matching mechanisms in practical situations: from Ebay, to the system residents go through when being paired with hospitals. He's a laid back professor who made the concepts easy to understand. If nothing else he opened my eyes to the many more problems I've been navigated through using these systems. I'd suggest him to any student.