Fantastic Professor, but Be Ready for the Workload!
I absolutely loved this Geography class! The professor made every lecture so engaging and fun, which is impressive for an 8 a.m. class—I was never sleepy during her lectures. Her explanations were clear and logical, and I learned so much about animals. The visuals she used were stunning and really brought the material to life.
That said, the workload can be a bit heavy. There’s a lot to review for exams, and the story map project requires quite a bit of effort. However, she gives plenty of time to prepare and is very organized about it. If you’re willing to put in the work, this class is incredibly rewarding. I highly recommend her if you want an engaging professor who makes learning enjoyable!

Dr. Illes is a great lecturer and she is good at it, but she might be the toughest teacher I have ever met. Do not take this course if you want to have a nice GPA. The class is not easy and I personally regret taking it.
For this class, there will be several labs and lab works related to that, one conservation module each week, one midterm of multiple choice and blank filling, and a similar final.

•Some pros of the class:
you really get to know animal preservation and biodiversity, and geology in general. The lectures are clear and easy to follow, although the topics are quite broad.

•Some cons of the class:
No recording for lecture; no microphone (although tons of people at the back could not hear her very well); no curving (although mean score was low); no study list for exams (which she promised to give us one); no make-up exams; no words and main points on PPT; no late submission for assignments for any reason; no textbook

The professor does not take attendance for lectures, but it is important to go to them because the only way to catch up is relying on others' notes. She also assume that students get sick only because of contagious diseases but not being aware of other physical and mental wellnesses, and she does not let student to catch up during office hour for getting sick because that is not her problem.
The conservation modules that we need to study are meaningless and get more and more confusing. The professor assign this module and expect us to be experts, but what really matters is the questions at the end of every module that might appear on the exam.
The labs are kind of fun but I don't get why we need to do these tbh.
The exam was disastrous, because every session has their own sets of questions (because she got comments about how unreasonable the tests were from past students and now she lets TAs to make the questions), which means different degree of difficulties for each sections and different point distribution; pretty unfair. Plus, the lecture covered A LOT of details and those were on the exam. You need to memorize everything on the lecture basically. No study list makes it even harder.
There is also a story map that we need to make, which I get the intent behind is to raise awareness for endangered species, but the structure of the how project does not make sense. We need to make a very specific and detailed research outline, but the presentation of the story map should not be more than 3 minutes, but also not less than 2:50 min otherwise you will not have any credit, which is again, unreasonable.

I don't understand why other comments say that the class is easy. This class isn't hard, but it is definitely not easy. Comparing to other GEs I have taken, this is the worst one. Generally it is not very friendly to students.

Not the most engaging class, there is a of variety of topics - no textbook makes the class a bit hard to follow. Feels like we cover a wide variety of topics and the connection between them is unclear. Besides that the labs are very manageable and the workload outside of class is very small/

Yall do not take a class with this professor. I actually took GEOG 146 (originally with Juan Herrera), however, Illes took over the class a couple of days before the start of the quarter. She completely changed the content of the class and made lectures asynchronous. I've taken another class with this professor--so have a few of my friends--and she usually makes her classes asynchronous (out of laziness). Her workload is a lot and offers no help or sympathy. On the first day of class, she made it known that this class would be challenging as most students taking this course were seniors. She is not helpful if you have questions over email and gets offended that you even had questions to ask. During pivotal moments through the quarter (the attack on the Palestinian encampment), she made it known that the midterm scores that week were unexpectedly low but she didn't care. Her tests are weirdly hard and challenging as she takes small details in each lecture to put in the exams. During week 7, she randomly let us know that we'd have a final even though she mentioned on the first day of class that there would most likely not be one. This class was originally meant to be fun and interesting but because she hates joy, she wanted to ruin it for everyone.