Kurt Semm

1. Weekly Reflections: Not difficult at all, just wants you to engage with weekly topics, pretty light lift 2. 3 Problem Set/Essays: Definitely intensive but there are only three and he gives very clear instructions and grades very objectively. Nothing to be concerned about. 3. He does take attendance and it does count towards final grade!

2 papers (about 3000words), weekly reflection, in class excersise, and take home final

Professor Semm is very clear about his expectations for students on the syllabus. He is extremely knowledgable about the subject matter and is truly one of the best professors in the Economics department. He truly wants each student to do well and makes sure each student has the tools they need to succeed. He offers non-penalized extensions for every assignment, no questions asked. He is a very engaging lecturer and does a great job integrating humor into class content. He is really really passionate about ecological economics and wants to spread his knowledge to students in an engaging and fun way. We did coding in class together and he always made sure that if anyone had a coding issue to immediately go over and help them. All around a great professor and would highly recommend taking his courses!

I feel like this is a much better introductory course to economics then the Intro to econmic reasong course Barnard has. Really interesting and thought provoking assignments that are graded easily! The readings are extremely long and dense, but you do not have to do a single one to succeed. Kurt is interesting.

2 assignments (each 20%), weekly discussion post (20%), participation (15%), and final (25%)

Great professor and super knowledgeable about different theories/frameworks. I highly recommend taking at least one course with him. Attendance was taken in each class, but I'm not sure if it really counted towards the final grade. There was a weekly discussion post, which was kind of a pain, but it served to make sure you did the readings. One of the assignments was a 2500 word essay and the other assignment was to answer a series of questions in about 500 words each. The final was take-home with multiple short essay response questions. Overall, Professor Semm was wonderful and always engaging!

3 long essays, weekly discussion posts, and "participation" which, in his words, is based on "whether he likes talking to you."

The only way I can describe Kurt Semm is as a Portland stereotype. He clearly thinks he's the smartest person in any room, but he rarely offers insight that isn't commonly circulated on Twitter. This is relevant because the entire class is just listening to him rant for 3 hours per week about the failures of capitalism and why the Soviet Union wasn't as bad as everyone says it was. You won't learn much about the theorists we study except for Kurt Semm's opinions on them, with the TAs occasionally interjecting to compliment his insightfulness. Basically these lectures were just glorified study halls; you’d look around the room and see maybe 4 out of 30 people actually paying attention with the rest doing work for other classes on their computers. Except for the first paper, none of what we talked about in the lectures was relevant to the assignments. Possibly the biggest waste of time in my college career was our mandatory "walking tour" around Wall Street, where we had to spend an entire morning taking selfies outside of various museums without actually having to look at the exhibits inside them. Neither he nor the TAs were responsive over email, and they would often schedule office hours that they then wouldn't show up to. Basically unless you caught them after class they were completely unreachable. Also be warned, he has a habit of arbitrarily lowering people’s semester gra…

Three essays, weekly discussion board posts, and "participation" which, in his words, is based on "whether he likes talking to you."

Institutions assignment (6 500 word responses), Commodities assignment (~2000 words), take-home final exam (4 responses, 500 words min - but ended up being more like 1000 words min)