*taken online during Covid* Erica Anjum is probably the worst professor I have ever had since I was in kindergarten. This class is so boring and soul sucking...her lectures are meaningless and meandering with slides that have 0 relevance. You would think this class is interesting but nope. If you have any interest in humanitarian work or the field of development stay away because this will kill your desire to do anything remotely similar to this in the future. She's a super nice person but just very misguided as a professor. If you take this class be sure to research your TA if possible, the last thing you want is a lecture that has no relevance to the assignments and a TA that grades super hard. Basically this becomes the TA's class as Anjum really has no direction. There is one quarter long group project based on sustainable development goals and a midterm...thats about it.

I took this class as a GE and hoped that it would be that one "interesting and fun" class in between all of my major courses. I really wanted to like this class, I really did. A lot of the things we talked or read about were very interesting, the class was pretty easy in terms of workload, and Professor Anjum is really nice, so it seemed to have everything going for it. However, going and attending lectures for this class was a chore. I don't think I went to a single lecture and came out understanding anything she had just said. The way she structured her lectures was boring and confusing. She would never really discuss any of the readings, glossed over things that seemed important, and talk for hours about other things that had really had no connection to the topic we were covering. This class could have been so interesting and its a shame lecture was pretty much useless.

The class was really easy but at the same the worst class ever. I had a huge interest in the IDS field, but this class destroyed my imagination as the lectures were really useless, unorganized and boring. I also had a feeling she wasn't knowledgable in the class materials, could definitely feel that she just started her teaching career. Take the class if it's offered, but avoid taking her class. But A is super easy if that's what you want (but you won't feel you learned something).

This class could have been so interesting and relevant to today's issues... instead, we learned about mercantilism in the 16th century and protests from a year ago.