Joe is awesome. He has two kids and gets up every morning super early to bike, which I mention because he usually started off lectures with videos of something cool he saw while biking or some part of his life. He's a really nice, approachable, and friendly guy who genuinely cares about the subject and the class. He also invites the class to go biking with him.

Lectures were interesting, engaging, and fun. I recommend going to class even though he uploads the slides to Canvas, because he used slides as guidelines/bullet points. It'd be hard to really get the same info from just reading the slides as you would from going to lecture, and you have to listen to pay attention to get actually useful notes. He engages students in the class (no cold calls), cracks a lot of jokes, and gets you to really think about the class topics. Sometimes you could get a little lost during lecture, but some people explained that he could sometimes go off on confusing tangents to the TA's and they worked with him to accommodate us.

The work is SO manageable. At most it's 35 pages of reading a week, which you can get done in like 1.5 hrs (2 max). You have one reflection a week, which I saw more as a weekly short paper because it was in essay format, but that makes it sound more intimidating than it was. You just had to be really straightforward and write in a clear essay format. The TA's just wanted to be able to quickly understand your logic/train of thinking when they read through your stuff. Grading was super generous for the reflections as long as you did that.

One midterm and one final, both pretty easy. Midterm was a few short answers and a brief essay. You get two-ish days to finish that. For the 10-page final paper I think you got a few weeks? I stressed about it but it wasn't so bad once you get started.

The TA's are angels! They're all very sweet, intelligent, and super caring. They arranged a midterm review session to help us and answered all of our questions super patiently. Shoutout to my TA Christina, who baked us banana bread after the midterm and told us she'd write us LOR's if we ever needed one.

TL;DR I loved this class. I took it my first quarter at UCLA for my major, and I would absolutely take it again. If you need an easy GE, this would be an awesome one with Joe.