Prof. Cattelino was amazing. Her lectures are very clear and interesting. Plus, she was very understanding of her students situations due to the pandemic and was open to extending deadlines for students who needed it. The weekly quizzes were not difficult and were great to just make sure you were absorbing the material in the lectures (almost all answers were literally in the lectures themselves). While the readings could be a little daunting, they were actually very interesting. I would 100% recommend anyone take this class.

I took this as a hopefully easy GE because it seemed interesting and let's just say I learned my lesson! Professor Cattelino is definitely a kind, funny, passionate, and truly knowledgeable professor, however the course is (in my opinion) not the easiest or best GE out there.

The grading breakdown was:
- Discussion Participation, 15% (you get one absence per quarter)
- Two 5-page Papers, 25% each
- Nine quizzes, 15%
- Final exam, 20%
- Minor extra credit from mid-quarter feedback form

The papers really stressed me out. I felt like the expectations from my TA were far higher than they should have been given our limited ethnographical writing experience, and I got docked for a lot of random things on the rubric (which was also really confusing). I went to my TA for help before the second paper and it was probably the most unhelpful conversation I have ever had in my life!

There are a LOT of readings to do, and I didn't really do them well, though it probably would have helped. They honestly were pretty interesting but this was my GE class and the amount of work was a lot in comparison to the 4 other STEM classes I was taking. The quizzes are mostly just about lecture and the readings though.

Lectures themselves were so long, and honestly most of the content felt like glorified common sense. Professor is really nice and asks questions but I honestly stopped going and started watching them on like 3x speed later on.

The final was difficult to gauge because she didn't give us any topics or study guide with the reasoning that part of good studying is figuring out what we needed to know by ourselves..... but it was not bad, definitely doable with studying key buzzwords (literally all I did) and the readings/specific situations and themes.

Averages for everything (papers and exams) were in the mid 80's. I got mid 90's for the second paper and final which is I think what pushed me into an A, but was fully expecting to not get an A. This was definitely a tough GE with very high expectations from my TA that made me feel really confused and defeated at times. I would take this if you have some sort of interest in the concepts, but then again I did too and here I am... :)

Professor Cattelino is very kind, considerate, and accommodating. The only assignments were weekly low-stakes quizzes (super easy as long as you pay attention to the lectures) which consisted of multiple choice questions and one short-response question (which may or may not rely on the readings for the week) and two term papers which were a little challenging to start, but the professor and TAs were very helpful and gave lots of feedback on how to write them. As someone who is not a social science major, I found this class to be an overwhelming amount of reading, but were usually thought provoking and interesting. In addition to the required texts for the course, a VPN is required for most readings. I would say the actual content of the course isn't difficult but the reading is dense.