Samuelson was an amazing English teacher who truly wanted her students to engage with the text and love the subject!

Samuelson is the first teacher that really taught me how to write well. This class required a lot of readings and work, however I found it helpful for my college experience. She's also super nice!

She was always late to class by like 10-20 minutes lol.

I don't think I enjoyed the class that much because we mainly focused on discussion in the class rather than learning new approaches to university level writing. You can get an easy A in this class if you do all of the reading assignments and participate in the class. (If you do not participate then you get a B+ even with all of the extra credit and assignments done like me.) I personally didn't feel invited in the class as I noticed she had most of her attention to students on one side of the room. However, I thought the material that she gave us was engaging to read. One thing that I really wish she did in this class was rather than allowing open discussion, she should focus primarily on teaching how to use grammar and style such as metalanguage or punctuation. I think I learned more about how to use grammar in English 3 than this class which caused me to also have B's or C's on every essay that I had written in her class. Also, she allows essay revisions, but unlike my English 3 class where we were able to keep revising our essays until the end of the quarter, you only get two weeks to revise in this class, which was hard for me to maintain when I had other heavy classes.

This class is pretty easy and it’s nice because you’re forced to think about your future and possible career. There were a couple writing assignments but everything is about yourself so it’s nothing hard. There was a group project teaching something about the honors program which was also simple. She seemed interested in helping you figure out things and looked at our resumes. There was some confusion about when things were due.

I absolutely loved professor Samuelson and this class. Because it was taken over the summer we only wrote two essays, but they were on very relevant topics. The first essay was regarding educational disparities and the second essay was more about the American Dream. Participation is very important in this class so make sure to do the readings and weekly reading analysis because it will help boost your grade and make you more prepared for class. There are extra credit opportunities in this class which helps ease the stress a bit. She is a tough grader but is extremely helpful and improved my writing immensely. She has two mandatory office hours to go over your essays before the final draft is submitted.
In the end I really enjoyed this class and despite being a lot of reading because of how open and passionate professor S. is.

Honestly? This class is boring and not worth it. I had to take it for a program I'm in, and I really didn't enjoy it. I did enjoy the projects though, I learned to make a website effectively and got some good feedback on my resume.

Actually helps and teaches, reasonable workload, makes you write bad drafts and lets you know that it's okay, helps you rewrite, books can be found on pdfs online

Prof Mary is a really helpful instructor, she would always provide help when needed. However, her work is pretty heavy. Weekly, one reading response of 800-1000 words along with a handful of readings. Her topics were fairly political or societal. 2 essays were required along with a group presentation. Everything about the essay writing process was graded: outline, draft, and final draft. They helped me come up with great final essays but it was a lot of work. I took only 2 courses, and the workload during summer made my fall quarter (with 4 courses) feel like a breeze.
If you genuinely want to improve your writing, go for Professor Samuelson.

Professor Samuelson is by far the best professor I have ever had at UCLA. She is accessible, helpful, and most importantly personable. This was an 8AM and I woke up everyday excited to join her class. Never in my time as an undergrad have I had such a caring professor who was genuinely interested in getting to know her students. The class itself was super fun and taught me a lot. Very politics focused but duh the election was happening during our quarter. Take this class! You will not regret it. Workload was just right! Some group projects, some individual projects! Very very fun class!!!

I think Professor S is a wonderful human being who really is empathic to her students and was curious about each and every one of us. She even cried on the last day of class. The course is very manageable/easy and while I am certainly grateful for that, I wish there was something more to it. The class is discussion-based which is really nice, but it just felt like a time to espouse lived experiences and to all agree with self-evident ideas like getting off the assembly line and growth mindset. "Roadmap" is really not that great of a book, and the other readings were repetitive and dull. I really lament that we didn't as a class ever interact critically with some of these texts or have discussions in which we talked to each other instead of at each other. The highlight of the class for me was reading Lawrence Lessig and the Remix Project, and I was pretty let-down that the E-Portfolio process didn't warrant more time in the class and that we created them using Wix.com... Yes, it's the best introduction web design with pre-made templates, but there are other more serious ways to build a personal website that aren't as expensive (if you upgrade) or as tacky as Wix.