HIS T3523

A few hours of reading per week, take home midterm and final.

This course was very interesting, and we covered a lot of material over the semester. It included students from a range of disciplines, so you do not need to know much about public health before joining. Professor Roberts knows his stuff, so every lecture is filled with interesting information. However, he can sometimes be talking about something that is not on the slide projected, which frequently consist of paragraphs that you have to rapidly copy down before he changes the slide. Would recommend this course to anyone interested in history, public health, urban studies, anthropology, sociology, and epidemiology.

The readings for the class are a bit long but they are assigned week by week so they are pretty manageable. Doing the readings is crucial to doing well in the course so I highly suggest doing them also because they are very interesting and cover a wide range of topics from many different scholars who are very well-versed in their craft. The course is considered an introductory history course so it's perfect for people like me who don't love to write long essays. The midterm and final are both written but are pretty manageable and the grading scale is fair. Again, doing the readings will pretty much ensure an average grade or more. You have to put in some effort when reading and writing but since the content is interesting it's not as hard in my opinion.

As someone who is a STEM major and planning to be a physician, Professor Robert's course was an amazing change of pace from my usual science-heavy curriculum. I would argue that this course is necessary to take if you wish to pursue medicine or any type of pathology and epidemiology. Professor Roberts is an amazing lecturer and tries to get to know the students on a personal level in lectures.

Weekly definitions that require citations of multiple sources and are a solid page or two each, a lot of reading, weekly discussion section, midterm and final.

I completely agree with the previous review. The readings for this course were fantastic and I typically enjoyed my discussion section, but Professor Roberts is a TERRIBLE lecturer-- definitely the worst I have had at Columbia. It's too bad because the course has so much potential-- like I said the readings are fascinating and the subject matter is so interesting, but he does such a poor job that it basically ruined the class! He was unbelievably unprepared for lectures, and rarely ever made a coherent point about anything he was rambling about. I consider myself a pretty good note taker and I was literally unable to take notes in this class because I could not follow anything he was saying. He goes from one tangent to another without ever really saying anything and its SO frustrating. He was prepared for class one time because there was a guest sitting in and the difference was shockingly obvious, which bothered me because it's clear he is quite capable of delivering a decent lecture if he decided to put some effort in. My favorite classes were the ones when we had guest speakers, which happened a couple of times-- they were great. I don't completely regret taking this course because I loved the readings and felt like I got a lot out of them, but Professor Roberts did a REALLY poor job of teaching the material.

A number of term definitions that he assigns at his own discretion (do not trust the syllabus), lecture series report (3-4 pages), midterm, final, discussion sections

Professor Roberts’ class Health Inequalities in the Modern United States is the worst class offered at Columbia. And possibly more importantly, Professor Roberts is probably the worst lecturer at Columbia University. After taking his class it is almost a disgrace that his has attained tenure here. But before you stop reading because this seems like a hate review just to bash a professor, please let me explain. This past semester was the first time this class was offered and I was unfortunately lured into taking it because professor Roberts’ semi-sarcastic and humorous lecture style during the first lecture made me think he would be a relaxed yet focused lecturer, which I think is important especially for a history class when the material can be incredibly dry at points. Things went completely down hill from the first class. I’ll break it down by lectures, assignments, and readings. Lectures: His lecturing style is horrific. He constantly (and knowingly) went off on tangents that were either not important to the topic of the lecture that day or completely irrelevant from the course as a whole, making it impossible to follow what he was trying to accomplish each class. The lectures were completely unorganized due to his incredible lack of preparation. His slides were consistently out of order showing that he probably spent a total of 10 minutes putting together the lectures each…

Weekly discussion sections and semi-weekly definitions (2-3 paragraphs). Midterm, final aren't that hard, but make sure to go to the review sessions. Attendance is 50%.

Roberts is a pretty terrible professor. While the course readings were good, he came unprepared to most classes after about the 6th week, using PowerPoints that were clearly not made for our class, but rather left over from other presentations he has done in his career. It seemed like he rolled out of bed each morning and made it all up as he went along. I often left lecture feeling like I learned nothing and with no better understanding of the readings. He even made us all go to a (terribly boring) conference that he organized (on a Friday and Saturday), and then had the nerve to re-use one of the PowerPoints from the event in class the next week. Boring and poorly-assembled lectures wouldn't have been a problem if attendance hadn't been worth 50% of the final course grade, but alas. You have to go to lecture and you have to pay attention, or else Roberts will call you out in front of the whole class or berate you after the lecture is over. He's clearly brilliant, but it seems he thinks he's invincible and above criticism. The course opens with a study of tuberculosis and race, but its seems that after that, Roberts isn't very knowledgeable about the histories of health and inequality in the modern US. It's almost like the department let him teach it just because he's written a book about TB, but they forgot to ask if he knew anything else about health in the 19th century. He…