PHS 3825

I'm a GPH major so I was really excited to take this course as a second-year before I had even gotten into the major. The setup of the course was appealing- there were reading assignments and questions due twice a week before class, but besides that attendance, the midterm, and the final were the only other things that went into the grade. Therefore, this class is a pretty easy A in my opinion (at least on Zoom). The major, major drawback however was that Dr. Colvin's lectures were exceptionally dry. It was clear he knew a ton about the material and was passionate about global health, but his lectures just went over the dry information in the textbook and droned on for 75 minutes straight. I would've really preferred if he outsourced more of his lectures to real world issues, data, stories, videos, or information, but maybe his lectures would've been more bearable in an actual lecture hall. On zoom, however, would not recommend.

This is a required course for GPH majors, so I thought I would give you some insight on the class to best plan when to take it. I want to start of by saying I did not like Chris Colvin and I felt like he was a bad lecturer, but since there are currently no other professor options I tried to keep my review to the course itself.

Class Structure: We had mostly Zoom lecturers with 2 in-person lectures for our last two classes. We would discuss the material we had read the previous week. The course is participation-based for the entire 2.5 hours. It can be pretty dreadful as you are graded on participation (but I rarely talked about got a good score on participation, so don't worry too much).

Grading:
Breakdown of grades: Attendance (10%), Weekly responses to Reading/Videos (40%), Participation in Class Discussions (25%), Final Reflective Essay (25%)
In my experience, this was an easy A course. There was a good bit of reading, but for the reading responses you did not need to read that much. The final essay consists of a reflection on the course, so it is not difficult.

Overall, this is a course that can fit into your schedule when you need an easier course.