HISA 2001

This class is super interesting and Professor Leonard is the best! He is incredibly passionate and knowledgeable about Indian history and is very helpful during office hours. There's a lot of dense and dry readings for that class that take a long time, but I found that skimming them prepared me enough for the lectures and discussions. You have a bunch of discussion posts that you have to do based on the readings, but Professor Leonard gives plenty of opportunities to do them. Some of the lectures were a bit boring at times, but I recommend paying attention and taking detailed notes during them as they are helpful for the midterm and final exam. Other than that, you have two short 1 - 1.5 page essays you have to write but they aren't very difficult and if you go to office hours, he'll help answer any questions you have. The material is super interesting and the class is fairly easy, I highly recommend taking it! #tCF2020

Please avoid this class if you hate small classes and confusing lectures. My comprehension of the material improved towards the end of the semester because he did frequent review sessions in class as the final got closer, but man... in the beginning I was truly lost at the purpose of the content, its meaning, and how it fit into the big picture. As this is a history class, I was expecting a brief breakdown of the content we'd be learning, but no. We jumped around a lot and unless you have experience with Hinduism or Buddhism, you'll be pretty lost. The professor goes on tangents a lot and speaks in "Ph.D." language, so he's really hard to follow. This class was about Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism and their histories but a lot of the readings did not help at all. He gave us 3 textbooks to read and I could never keep up. It is necessary to do all of the readings beause you'll be lost for the midterm and the final if not. The midterm was 80 minutes with 25 MC questions and 5 essays. It was impossible. Same for the final. Also, participation is strongly encouraged, but very difficult because it is such a small class.