Overall, the course is good. Professor S is very nice and helpful. Class discussions are engaging. Sometimes the homework can be interesting. I think the course is very useful for juniors or seniors cuz you are basically reflecting your roadmap and writing those application materials. However, heavy workload, more than a writing class. Anyway, Professor S gives fair grades, and it's easy to get an A, but you need to write A LOT!

Professor Samuelson was a great professor and truly cared about the improvement of students writing. I was nervous at first to take the course because at first, I did not feel confident in my writing. As I end the course, I feel more confident in my writing and I have learned many helpful writing tips. The course was challenging, but I feel that I improved so much as a writer. Professor Samuelson mentioned in the beginning of the course, that if we put in the work and time on our essays we would do great in the class and I agree. I was once a person who said "This is my first draft and final draft," but now I go through the process of writing a bad first draft and revising it. I enjoyed the assigned readings because they were relevant to today's world and I was actually interested and engaged when reading them. The reading responses, I felt were tedious, but they were very helpful when it came to starting my rough drafts. Professor Samuelson always encouraged students to attend office hours, and I did, which I felt was very helpful. I highly recommend Professor Samuelson because she was encouraging and helped me to become more confident in college writing. I now implement the writing skills I learned in the class to other classes where I need to write.

I highly recommend this class to anyone interested in learning about digital media and applying it professionally. I'm an English major and tend to be more introverted, but this class really brought out my creative side, teaching me how to create blogs, websites and stay connected with the news while listening to the assigned Daily podcasts. The class would consist of lectures over the readings (in-person), 2 group presentations (zoom), and one assigned reading-day leader who would discuss the chapter we read the night before (in-person). Class discussions of cancel culture, student activism, and opinions on controversial podcast episodes were very engaging. This class was my favorite of all my courses, and although it contained the most work with the project-based assignments and two-page responses, all the topics were relevant and fascinating to learn more in-depth about. Honestly, the projects felt more like fun than homework. She grades very fairly, and her feedback is always lovely and thorough. Professor S. just wants everyone to participate and express their interpretations of the topics creatively. Bottom line: THIS CLASS IS AMAZING!!! If you want a break from reading and writing essays or a chance to discover something new and helpful, take this course.

This class was very project-heavy. It's not really like a class class with material, we mostly just talked about our career aspirations. It was helpful because one of the assignments was creating a resume which we got feedback on. There were just so many projects though. It was like project after project. It got pretty hard to manage tbh. We worked on a blog throughout the quarter that we would write posts for intermittently. There were also Written Response assignments mostly about the Roadmap book. Lots of readings, some long. Everyone has to lead discussion one time and for that you have to read the reading in depth and make a presentation on it (slideshow as well as around 10 minute presentation, but some people's were 20-30 minutes). Next we had a Group Website Project which was kind of exhausting. None of these projects are hard, they're just very time-consuming. It is difficult to make pretty websites. So hard in that way. Then right after that group project we had to write another blog post about Cultivating Happiness (see it's not hard stuff, it just takes up a lot of time). And then we wrote our resumes. And then we had a third Blog Post about Goal-Setting, and then a "Remix Project" right after that (another project! They kind of never ended), and then for the Honors Collegium I had to make a TikTok about my freshman year, which I guess wasn't really for this class but for the honors program, and then our LAST project was making an "E-Portfolio" where you essentially turn your resume into (ANOTHER) website. You're lucky if you have experience making website when you go into this class.
Update I'm a junior now and I turned the website I made for this class into a sustainability-promoting site that I'm sending on job apps. So if you can def make your website something you will use.

three long papers...
discussion comments 5/quarter.
the professor got sick or whatever so i did not get 2 of my papers. so i did not know what improvements i needed.
shes nice.

She isn't even nice. Worst professor I had so far and will ever have at UCLA. I worked extremely hard on the essays and talked with her several times via appointments but she'd never give me anything in the A range. She is an unreasonably harsh grader (the average grade of her classes is C+ or something), there are a lot of workload that is very time-consuming, and her feedbacks on the essays don't help at all because she just writes a bunch of "awkward"s on top of sentences and don't give any specific advice. Her lectures focus too much on the topic (media and consuming in US) rather than on how to write well. She was either late or did not come to one-on-one office hour appointments and did not even apologize. Fucking hated her. Avoid her if you can.