Sudhir Venkatesh

Professor Venkatesh is an extremely honest person. He WILL say what he thinks, and sometimes it’s so unfiltered that it comes across as disingenuous. You best believe he cares deeply about teaching, though.

This is one of those classes that you didn't realize you loved until you walk out of the final. Professor V's methods are unconventional to say the least, but if you want deep class discussion and a solid explanation of modern media theory, this is the way to go. For a lot of classes, you get out what you put into it, but that is especially true with this one. Do the readings if you want to do well, but--more importantly--if you actually want to take something from this course.

I took a sociology course at a community college before attending Columbia, and I learned at least ten times more from the community college class. This class was a huge disappointment to me. I came into this class expecting to gain a solid foundation of sociological knowledge upon which I could build my planned sociology major, but instead, this class would more appropriately have been titled The Chicago School of American Inner Cities. It became clear over the course of the semester that Prof. Venkatesh has an extraordinarily narrow breadth of knowledge when it comes to sociology. My TA even cautioned us that we were missing knowledge of key theories routinely covered in introductory sociology classes, knowledge we will be expected to have in future classes. Beyond the narrowly focused nature of the coursework, he himself was almost intolerable to most classmates I talked to. His inflated ego was manageable to me, but his trick questions on tests and six missed classes (while enforcing a strict attendance policy upon students) were just plain disrespectful. HE LITERALLY MISSED SIX CLASSES! I'm still not even sure how this is possible. And, even worse, on 4 of the days he wasn't present, the TA's took attendance so the class could watch YouTube videos!! Never in my life did I expect I would be forced to watch YouTube videos during class at an Ivy League institution. It's an a…

Professor V is an incredible professor. He is down-to-earth and makes learning fun and relatively easy despite learning challenging material. He is genuinely invested in his students, not just as "students" but as human beings, and has expressed such kindness and support throughout the semester. He is always there for office hours if needed and never makes you feel bad for asking for help or extra time. Professor V also has such a passion for what he teaches, and it makes coming to class every day exciting; he makes everyone else excited about what we are learning. I had him for two classes this semester, and I strongly disagree with the other reviews on here. While the courses are hard and taught rather unconventionally, he is not a bad teacher, and the classes aren't ones to avoid. I knew nothing about sociology going into these classes, and he made me more invested in it than I thought. He also does a great job at connecting the material to what is going on in our current political and technological climate.

These reviews are unnecessarily harsh. While the professor was strict (ok very strict, he had minimal tolerance of phone/internet use in class) and unconventional, I can honestly say that this was one of the most useful classes I took in my time at Columbia. I work in social media now and have to say there isn't a week that passes that I don't feel compelled to reference Shirky, Lessig, Surowiecki (names you'll come across a lot throughout the course, they are all top scholars of the online/digital world) or topics we discussed in class related to online communities, privacy, and crowdsourcing. I got a B on the midterm (uncurved) and ended up with an A in the class... you'll be fine.

I think some of the reviews of this class and this professor are too harsh, so I'm just going to throw my two cents in. It's true that the class was not terribly well organized. I often left class unsure of what I was supposed to have learned. This was not because I didn't learn anything in the class, but because the things I did learn seemed so random that I knew they must have just been examples for a larger point he was driving at. Unfortunately, Professor Venkatesh rarely articulated his "larger point" - in fact, I'm not sure if he ever articulated an opinion even once in the entire course. His class basically consisted of him asking questions, waiting for responses, and then shooting those responses down. He didn't do this in a mean way, more as a "devil's advocate" to make us see how sociology might expose preconceptions in our thinking. I found this to be an interesting teaching method, and generally enjoyable. It did not lend itself to organization, but it wasn't without merit. If you need a lot of structure, this may not be the course for you. Does Professor Venkatesh have a high opinion of himself? Probably so. Is he as arrogant as everyone says he is? Definitely not. His references to himself were almost always in a self-deprecating way, even if they did tend to highlight the fact that he is living a pretty good life. They were jokes. Yes, he made fun of Columbia st…

As someone who put an average amount of effort into this class, take it. Not sure why there are so much hate towards it. Yes, it is much different than any other class but in a good way. He encourages you don't use your laptops not because he hates tech but more because that is the habits that we fall into every day. This class will make you think about and consider how addicted we are to our phones. I found it super interesting and Sudhir is an absolute chiller.

The problem with Venkatesh is that you feel like you are being manipulated for his own gain instead of being in the class to learn. When you walk into Professor Venkatesh, you will like him. He is charismatic, humorous, and articulate. Everything he says will appeal to you for about five minutes until you realize that he is just talking out of his ass and says absolutely nothing of substance. He almost never moderates discussion, to point that irrelevant tangents consumer a huge portion of class time. In essence, he is the poorest example of the Socratic method that I have ever come across. Not only is Venkatesh unprofessional because he often shows up to class late, and tries to lecture via Skype under some pretty flimsy pretenses, it is also clear that he cares very little about the class. That being said, the TA's were exceptional and the readings were interesting for anyone who is not a sociology major. Honestly, if you care about this stuff, just get a copy of the syllabus and use Wikipedia. P.S. the TA's said they had never seen a un-curved test graded so harshly.

I absolutely agree with the review below. This class was an utter disappointment. Venkatesh is a cool guy who's done a lot of truly ballsy field work, but as a professor he pretty much failed. It's not so much his arrogance that got to me, but the total lack of effort he put into the class. On the very first day, he scared the crap out of everyone by telling us that we could not pass/fail the course and we could not come more than 5 minutes late or he would lock us out. That, in addition to his constant assertions that sociologists are "all assholes" and that Columbia students are mostly either "legacies or athletes" who don't truly deserve to be here, made me believe that the course would be killer but that at least the professor would be brilliant and make it worth it. Oh, how wrong I was. First of all, he never enforced the coming late rule because he himself was late the vast majority of the time. Either that, or he didn't show up at all. If we had a movie to watch or a test to take, you can bet that he was not there. He did not even come on the very last day of the course, since we took our final that day. Although this may not sound like a big deal at first, it truly is a reflection on the minimal amount of work he put into the class. Enough on the instructor - the class itself was also a complete mess. This class is supposed to be an introductory course into sociology.…

One of the few times I would insist you just trust the culpa reviews and avoid avoid avoid. Blows my mind that despite 14 ears of consistently dogbreath reviews, he is so far up his own chimney that he must have closed his eyes reading every course evaluation ever and has changed nothing. He randomly doesn’t show up to class or cancels last minute, selectively humiliates students, and is just incredibly, insufferably arrogant. I have a lot of love left for professors who needle at Columbia students’ elitism, but for him to stand up there with his monogrammed handkerchief boasting about his Hamptons house and two divorces and insist that HE is somehow the messiah of social justice and we’re all just sheep - please. If he so badly wants to play patty cake with the jocks in the front row and advertise his podcast, he can do so on someone else’s time and money. People argue that's his shtick, but I'm not dropping a porsche 911's worth in tuition to hear a gimmick that fails to acknowledge its own irony and stands between me and my degree. Waste of time. Hurts my heart and faith in our generation that some people thought this was prime time education.