First Year Seminar @Barnard · Columbia University
The selection of readings for this class was magnificent. It was a shame that it was an 8:40 and that many people were not in the mood for discussion. Prof Mehta may not have been the best at encouraging discussion, but she was good at making class contents personal to each student. She made it a point to get to know everyone and try to make the content palatable and relevant to each individual identity.
Super fun if you already are passionate about the material, but she doesn't do an excellent job of inspiring interest if it isn't already there. A little droning at times, but she is super sweet, very understanding, and a joy to be around
Professor Mehta is one of the most amazing human beings I have ever met. She is an excellent teacher that truly cares about her students and wants to learn with us. She is extremely kind, funny, caring and intelligent. Not only is her academic career amazing (with ba in Yale, master in Oxford, and PhD at Columbia), her cultural background is so interesting where she has travelled basically to everywhere in the world. The class is very open and she fosters a welcoming environment. She is a great teacher if you are looking for having chats about life, culture, love, and classes while she ponders on how to make your essay better. Also, she takes the class to fun field trips. She is truly the best!
Professor Mehta is a lovely human being and professor. She's very nice and tries to get students to engage with the content. However, I do think that you should only take courses with her if you are genuinely interested in the topic or it'd be the longest 55 minutes of your life. Nothing about the course is life changing, but the course did enhance my experience here!
Linn Mehta is the sweetest woman in the entire world. She is also very helpful when giving feedback on your writing. As long as you make and effort and take her corrections, you can succeed in the class. The discussions in class can be very boring, it's true unfortunately. The readings are good (except Wasteland, that was awful), people just don't do them (this was true even before classes went online). But also, she could do a better job of getting the class engaged. I feel bad saying anything bad about her, she truly is the sweetest person ever.
Linn is a very nice woman, but she does not facilitate discussion successfully. The readings are often interesting and carry a nice thread throughout the course; however, her class is incredibly boring. Only 2 students participate and are engaged. She changes her feedback after handing back the essay, which makes it incredibly challenging to write successfully for her. Unlike any other first year writing class, we had to write an extra essay and a 10-15 page research paper (not the usual 7-9 pages).
Prof Mehta encourages you to find your own voice and seek out your own interpretation and meaning in the material, which makes her a rare gem among the overly pedantic, egotistical English teachers that we all know too well. I wasn't interested in Latin American literature at all before taking this course but Prof Mehta made me fall in love with it. She's open to a more creative slant on assignments, and she believes in pushing you to find the beauty of the written word. She is one of the best professors I've had at Barnard and I urge you to take her course-she's one of those "life changing professors" that the Barnard recruiters were telling us about when they convinced us to come here.
Prof. Mehta is one of the most understanding professors I've had yet. I feel l ike she honestly cares about her students, and she's always available if you need her. She was very flexible with the paper deadlines, and she always let us write first drafts and even scheduled meetings to discuss them. If you want to improve your writing, she's a great person to go to. Unlike most professors at this university, she will give you the paper grade that you deserve, it's no easy A. (probably an easy B though) If your paper is bad enough, she'll give it back without a grade, and let you rewrite it. She's a very caring and wonderful professor. She even changed the syllabus for this awful class to fit our interests.
3 essays, and an annotated bibliography, and a small final presentation, friendly grader
Sweetest woman ever, just doesn't have a knack for encouraging interest in the material and our discussion. Would often talk to fill the void instead of leaving it more up to us to have a class discussion. Don't take if you're looking for a super engaging seminar experience.