the sweetest prof I ever had. Don't listen to anyone that says you can't understand him literally just sit closer and you're chillin. He's so cool and pls engage and talk to him people tend to pack up early but if you take this class PLS BE NICE TO HIM and protect him at all costs 🙏. Easy class and its comprised of 2 multiple choice quizzes and an essay. Pretty straightforward and the topics are kind of common sense.

Overall Vibe: 89 is a small honors seminar that you can co-enroll in if you are taking Soc 1 (there is also a version for Soc 20 I believe). I LOVED this class, though it may not be everyone's cup of tea. We were pushed to read the same kinds of paper's Dr. Villarreal's PhD students are engaging with, which I thought was a great learning opportunity. The structure was collaborative, and I find small environments (about 10 students) to be much more conducive to learning than big lectures. Honestly I learned much more in this course than in the Soc 1 co-requisite lecture.

Exams: No exams :)

Readings: 1 academic article or study per week. These could be dense and a challenge to understand at times, but Dr. Villarreal was encouraging and acknowledged that it may be difficult. As long as I engaged critically with the material, any challenges or misunderstandings with absorbing the material did not hurt my grade; I truly felt like the purpose of this class was to stretch myself and learn in a supportive environment. I found most of the studies he selected to be really interesting and topical (a lot on race, gender, and immigration as these relate to employment and other life outcomes in modern America).

Papers: We wrote a short, 1-page double-spaced reflection each week. These were due Sunday at 8 am before the Monday seminar meeting. At first I was not thrilled by the Sunday 8 am deadline. However, I came to appreciate the reasoning behind this: Dr. Villarreal literally prints out every single one of our reflections and spends a few hours of his Sunday reading through them and making notes on points he wanted us to bring up in the discussion. For those who complain he was not engaged in our learning in the soc 1 lecture, I think it is just because there are so many students (200+). His 89 course showed me he clearly cares about helping students to learn and probably the lecture is just a difficult environment in which to provide 1:1 support or feedback. Anyways, the papers were not difficult but did force everyone to read the article and at least have something to say in class. In a lot of my other discussions it is easy to show up without reading the article (I even do that from time to time sadly) but this reflection really forces you to read and try to understand as much of the material as possible which makes for a great class discussion. I received a 95% on all of my reflections.

Participation: As long as you show up and speak (he makes sure to call on everyone when moderating the discussion) and submit your weekly reflection, you will receive full participation credit. Also, you are allowed to miss 2 reflection assignments with no penalty to your grade.

Additional Advice: Go to his office hours! I regret that I never went. Dr. Villarreal is an extremely accomplished researcher and I feel like he would've had lots of interesting advice in OH.

Key Takeaways:
-Dr. Villarreal is very personable
-The weekly articles were quite interesting
-Take this class if you have any interest in social science research, or just want to actually stretch your learning in a class without it being stressful
-Take this class if you prefer small, discussion-based learning environments
-You do not need a sociology background to take this class or find the material interesting
-Again, even though the material is a challenge, this will NOT hurt your grade! The class is all about showing up, stretching your thinking, and showing that you are engaging with the material

Very nice professor. Overall class is not hard. The lecture slides are directly from the textbook readings so lectures can get boring at times and the professor is sometimes hard to hear. The class consisted of 2 multiple choice exams and an essay which were not very difficult. Would recommend this class as a GE!

Very nice professor. He clearly wants us all to do well and makes it very clear how we should study for the exams, he even sends out a list of terms to focus on. If you understand the concepts in lecture and can apply them to real world scenarios you should do well in the class.

The professor seems very sweet and approachable. I recommend sitting closer to hear him better because if you're far away, it might be hard to understand. If you keep up with the readings, you should be fine. I never really went to lectures or read and still managed a C +. So, if you do the readings regularly, you should get a high grade easily. My TA was Kelsey and she was nice and understanding, I recommend her !

I took this as a GE and it is a pretty easy as long as you stayed on top of the lecture slides readings. I personally just did the slides before class and the readings in my free time. He quotes from the textbook a lot but I feel like reading the textbook gave me more context and examples for the concepts. Overall the concepts were pretty easy and I think that as long as you put in the work you will be good. The study guides given were useful and were things that were on the test. I got an A in the class but lowk I hate that for the essay, the prompt is super broad. Your TA is the one grading it so I would personally just go to office hours to ask if your structure and idea is good. I don't think that going to lectures were useful at all and only went bc it was "mandatory."

This man is so sweet and lowkey so funny sometimes. You can get away with reading from the textbook but he is really interesting to talk to after class. The exams were easy but I didn't put in as much time as I should have, so they were more difficult for me. Just read the book and you'll be fine. There was barely any homework-- just discussions and maybe some quizzes. There were just 2 exams and an essay, but all very doable. Would definitely recommend him

Overall an easy GE. Not a heavy workload, but you definitely need to be well prepared for the exams because even though they are multiple-choice, the answers are very similar and it is hard to tell sometimes.

Super easy class with two multiple choice tests and one short essay. Attending lecture is basically pointless since he teaches straight from the book. I just read the chapters and that's all I needed to do well on the tests.

Nothing grand, though the class might be fun for anyone interested in sociology. The assignments were just weekly 1-page reflections on the assigned reading for the week - the reflections were graded, though I'm not 100% sure what the criteria was (the averages pretty much stabilized 90-95 by week 3). The readings were, for the most part, research papers related to the topic covered that week in SOCIOL 1. In terms of the actual class period, the professor would usually give a 30-minute talk related to the reading, then ask the class to discuss/give opinions on it. (There usually weren't many.) Notably, this class doesn't really feed back into SOCIOL 1 - it won't give you an advantage there, for instance. That being said, I thought the readings were pretty interesting - they were generally a mix of major past studies and a few of the professor's own papers, which I thought was cool.