PLCP 2420

I sort of went into this class blind because there weren't any reviews, but it was a pretty interesting class. The set-up of the class was pretty unusual for such a big lecture--we were split up into groups of around 6-7 people based on a Myers Briggs test and sat in circular tables with our groups everyday. Professor Echeverri-Gent built in discussion time during the class where we had to talk about the readings with our groups. I ended up really liking the "active learning" part of the class but he does do cold calls occasionally which is stressful if you didn't finish the readings. This class was A LOT of work!! We had to submit a question by 9pm the night before each lecture based on the readings from Marx, Durkheim, Foucault, Weber, etc.. These readings were super dense would take forever to read/understand. I had a lot of late classes and there was just not enough time to do all the readings before submitting the questions. These questions were graded on a scale of 1-8 and it was very hard ( almost impossible) to get full credit and most people would get between 5-7. This was frustrating because there weren't any guidelines for what to include in the questions so it was hard to write better ones. We also had to write 2 midterm papers and a longer paper due during finals week. I spent FOREVER on these papers but I ended up doing well on them (I got A-s on both) Basically, as long as you take a lot of notes in class and pull good quotes from the readings, you can do well on the papers. Even though this was a hard class, I'm glad I took it because it was very important to me that I have a background in the writers we studied for other classes going forward. The professor genuinely tried to make the class fun and engaging and even assigned a fun video/podcast group project to do which I enjoyed. Overall I would recommend this class, but only if you are prepared to put in the time and do most of the readings.