This class is an honors seminar that's meant to be taken in conjunction with Sociology 1. The seminar only meets once a week for 50 minutes, so it's not that much of a commitment, but there was some difficulty to understanding the research articles we were supposed to read and discuss every week (the main component of the class). It was also rather hard to come up with insightful commentary to put in the one-page weekly memos, but with time one gets better at it. On the bright side, you're only required to write 6 the entire quarter so there are three weeks where you can take a break. Villarreal was good at starting conversations, but the weekly discussions were more of us shelling out our opinions one at a time to him than a discussion between peers. Overall, a valuable seminar that lets you dive a bit deeper into Sociology 1 content and gives you a good outlet to get to know the professor in a smaller setting!

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.