HIST BC1101

Hundreds of pages of reading every week 3-hours long exams

A ton of reading. One 4-6 page paper where you have to go to the Met and pick a piece of art work. One 4-6 page paper on comparing Hume and Rousseau. (Both graded extremely harshly). One midterm and one final. For both he gives the essay questions and Id's in advance so you can outline but even if you know the information cold, they are graded very arbitrarily by your Ta's...

Since this is my first year at Columbia, Kira is the first TA I've had with recitations. She did not fulfill the criteria of the "TA from Hell", which is what I'd always imagined TAs would be like. She really made my experience an educational and enjoyable one. She came to recitation every day with tons of knowledge that she was eager to share with us. And even though it was a discussion section, she didn't force us to share ideas or treat us condescendingly if we didn't respond correctly. She was very welcoming of different opinions and ideas. We were required to read selections of texts before each recitation, but she didn't make us feel initimidated if we came ill-prepared, which happened quite often. When you hand in rough drafts to her for suggestions, she returns them in a timely fashion and gives you GREAT suggestions and ways to improve the paper's strength in argument and organization, down to the punctuation. You can really tell that she's enthusiastic about the material and is excited for you to learn it. She knows her stuff and is willing to share it with you. Without intimidation and condescention, she ran the recitation perfectly well and perhaps even better than her colleagues from the other sections. If she decides to become a professor here, I'll definitely take her course.

4 quizzes, weekly readings for section, 2 essays

Irrelevant, as nothing will be good enough for him.

This was, without question, the finest academic experience I’ve ever had at Columbia—if by “finest” you mean the class that single-handedly destroyed my passion for studying history. If you enjoy no-laptop policies, no uploaded slides, hundreds of pages of reading every week, the harshest TA and grading—all for an introductory course—then this is absolutely the class for you. My grade wasn’t low, but the learning experience was bad

I would like to start off with noting that when I read the reviews before I wanted to take this class I thought it would be a piece of cake and it was NOT. I loved European history in high school and thought that this class would be interesting and a new take on Euro but that thought was a total fail. While Professor Wennerlind is pleasant to look at, his lectures were disorganized and kind of covered a bunch of things with no uniform guide. He assigned a million readings that were not necessary to do and the TA's SUCKED (try not to get Peter is you take this class). It really should have been an easy class, but I guess Professor Wennerlind knew that people didn't take it so seriously in the past and made sure to make the grading extra difficult. Overall, I was not impressed with this class at all. I came into Columbia wanting to be a history major and this class made me regret ever thinking about majoring in history.

BEST PROFESSOR!!! So nice and most interesting lecturer. Never boring. The quizzes are pretty hard but I think it's worth it. He knows how to make boring topics very not boring. The class entails 2 essays around 6 pages each, not too bad but somewhat challenging. Also weekly readings but easy to get away with not doing them if that's what you're into. 9/10 would recommend.

Stay clear of this odd ball. He is the type of TA who is on a serious power trip. He must have been raised in a bubble, by a teacher who considered him to be their pet. I guess he wasn't pet enough.... All jokes aside (not that any jokes have been told), stay clear, unless you are willing to do some serious brown nosing...

Minimum. Midterm, final, one partner assignment involving going to the Met and writing about an object, one paper. Weekly recitation sections are pointless.