Karen Seeley

The worst most boring class I've ever taken at this school. No direction whatsoever. Classes were dry, no one would speak, the professor didn't have much to say. It was really just a repetition of the same basic concept. Really truly a waste of time. The prof was sweet enough and definitely made herself available but was low-key vindictive with grades and just pretty dry.

Karen Seeley is a really amazing Professor. I’ve taken both her culture and mental health seminar and cultural psych seminar. She knows how true a seminar in a way that i have not seen with most other professors. She strikes the perfect balance between seminar and discussion. The readings are extremely interesting but not too long. The course includes a midterm paper and final paper. Depending on if it’s an anthro course or psych course, the paper lengths differ. Highly highly recommend! I feel that my future career will be highly influenced and benefitted by this class.

I was underwhelmed by this course. As a Psychology major, I took the class to expand the breadth of my knowledge into another field. However, I found that Karen Seeley barely touched on any issues of psychology, and went straight into deep anthropological issues, which for the non-anthro majors in the class made it quite a challenge. I also found the class extremely dry; while the books we were reading were interesting, her interpretation of them sounded more like preaching, and she was extremely pretentious in handling student comments. Towards the end of the course I didn't feel like sharing my thoughts and having her tell me why I had interpreted the book wrong. It went the same way with the essays -- any insightful thoughts that were new or different to Karen Seeley would result in a bad grade.

great class, seemed somewhat redundant at times but really eye-opening, especially if you're a psychology major. The readings were interesting, she used a psychological and anthropological approach which you never really get from other, more traditional psych classes. She always tries to make herself available to the students too. No matter what you say in class, she listens and uses your comments to build upon.

The class was well organized and the reading was usually really interesting. Seeley has a gentle manner and seems quite friendly if a little reserved. However the class was seminar style but Seeley would spend most of the class giving back ground on the reading essentially telling us what it was about, which made reading unnecessary and also killed most opportunity for discussion since she spent so much time talking. Part of the reason discussion in the class might have failed so horribly was that it was at 9am, the class was small and in my opinion half of the kids in the class were really boring and the other half had no idea what the reading was let alone what it was about. Bottom line you will end up learning something no matter how little work you do. If you can write coherent big papers, actually do the reading, and don't mind being bored occasionally, you can do well and actually learn something too.

I learned quite a bit about psychoanalytic theory in this course, as well as the state of psychoanalysis today.

Two assignments (papers) that were graded randomly.

I agree with the review below: this one of the best psychology classes I have taken at Columbia so far. Informative, educational, rigorous but with a moderate workload, this is the ideal class to fulfill your seminar requirement. Prof. Seeley is just wonderful, and I highly recommend this class.

Moderate. Several dense chapters a week which would be discussed in class once a week. 10-12 page midterm paper, 12-15 page final research paper. One week of generating discussion questions and leading discussion.

one midterm paper (not sure, 10 pages? maybe less) and one final paper (15-20). She's really receptive of whatever you write, gives a lot of positive feedback, and is an easy grader.