PLIR 3500

This is a review for PLIR 3500: religion, violence, and strategy with Jerry White. This class consists of one midterm, one group presentation, one short paper, a final research paper, and a participation grade. Professor White is very knowledgable and is a fun lecturer- there were also many guest lecturers. However, the organization of this class was poor and requirements were unclear. We often got 200ish pages of reading and talked about them in class for 15 minutes. The grading was easy, I did about 10% of the readings and got A's on all the midterms and papers. If you are interested in religious violence in the MENA region like I was, we actually rarely talked about this. The main focus was strategy and how to resolve geopolitical conflicts.

Professor White is an incredible man and is a unique professor to get the chance to learn from (if you don't believe me google him). The class is a bit disorganized but the key is to not stress about the disorganization, especially because he is learning more about how to structure the course each semester. The point of the class is to expose you to new critical thinking and learn to make strategies that will create effective change and get things done. Professor White's expertise in policy is unique and the way he challenges you to think is an experience every politics student has before they graduate. For those of you who care about grades if you do even 1/4 of the work they ask you and turn in all your assignments you will get a great grade, as White really just wants to expose you to the material and thinking.

This class sounds really interesting, but I dreaded going to class every week. It was incredibly boring and focused on all these different ways to think about strategy. The professor gave us like 5 different information organizers, and they all overlapped which made no sense. I really hated this class, and I'm a politics major. Some people seemed to enjoy it though so maybe it's just not my thing (style of class).

This is the worst class I've ever taken at UVA. The requirements were extremely unclear throughout the semester for literally every assignment. Because the class was a mix of "substantive" info on religious violence and "leadership," he would waste half of each class just rambling on about different leadership strategies. He literally compared leadership personalities to air, water, wind, and fire (Avatar, I know right). We were assigned ridiculous amount of reading that we didn't even end up covering in class. We also had a group project and a final paper that had barely any guidelines. I ended up getting a B plus on the final paper because I was so confused as to what I was even supposed to write about. The class was just so pointless and frustrating because he would give us so many assignments, and would penalize us for not going in depth enough about a certain topic when he literally taught us nothing in class. He's also super pretentious. Just SUCH a waste of time, I dreaded going to class each week. Don't take this class.

Worst class ever. Do not take regardless of how interesting the concepts sound to you because you will not learn anything about religion-related violence.

This class is a mess. The topic sounds interesting enough, but as other reviewers have mentioned, religion/religious violence is mainly concentrated in the readings and the lectures tend to be more centered around leadership and strategy. Assignments aren't necessarily graded super harshly, but instructions are incredibly vague so going to the office hours for the TA is vital to understand what they're looking for. I ended up doing reasonably well in the class, but it was my main source of stress this semester due mostly to how uncertain I was about what was being asked of me. It can be tough to get into courses in the PLIR department if you're not a fourth year, but fight the temptation and avoid this one.