Professor Ghervas is a very knowledgeable professor of European History. She takes attendance so you must attend lecture, but she also encourages attending her office hours. That being said, she is a very tough grader and has seemingly unrealistic expectations for her students. There were an average amount of readings but it sometimes felt like she expected us to have a total recollection of them. If we weren’t able to answer her questions in class regarding the readings, she was kind of passive aggressive and would say we just didn’t do them. Assignments consisted of a Midterm Paper that was 3 pages, a Final Paper that was 6 pages, and an Extra Credit film response. The midterm grades were very harsh in comparison to other professors here. The average was 20/30 and she even went as far as telling us in class that we essentially sucked at writing. I, along with other classmates, took our papers to the History Writing Center, per her suggestion, and they even said that it should’ve been graded higher. Also, while we were given papers, she’ll probably stray away from this due to a few students using ChatGPT in our class. She’ll probably do in class Blue Book exams instead, as that is what she stated we might switch to after the midterm paper. Overall, you’ll learn a lot but her expectations seemed insane at times.

I appreciate that this was Professor Ghervas' first time teaching at UCLA, but honestly I was really disappointed. I signed up for the class really excited to learn about peace and war in Europe, but was quickly met with the fact that this woman has very specific beliefs and preconceptions about Europe which she wanted to pass on to her students, thinking outside the lines here or contradicting her made her upset. One major thing that the professor repeatedly brought up was strong anti-Russian sentiments, you could tell her positions on the current war in Ukraine and she was not open to discussion to challenge this position at all. Throughout the whole course she would continue to slip in her own personal opinions and biases into the lecture. Overall this left me really disappointed as this was a class I was really looking forward to, but one that was ruined by a professor who was not able to keep their own biases out of the classroom and welcome all opinions.