This class is amazing!!! Professor Wright is the best professor I have ever had at UCLA so far. I would highly recommend this class to everyone. It's a wonderful way to fulfill your diversity requirement and social analysis GE.

I'll be honest, initially I only enrolled in this class because it was one of the only GE's with spots available, and I didn't have high expectations. However, I was very quickly proven wrong. Professor Wright gave extremely interesting and eye-opening lectures that taught me about many important and relevant topics. It's clear he's super passionate about international development and that really comes across in his lectures. He's also super chill, understanding, kind, and accommodating. He's the type of prof who actually has empathy for his students.

The workload for this class was very reasonable. We had a two-page double-spaced reflection due every Sunday at 11:59 pm. The reflections covered things we learned in lectures and the readings, so as long as you are taking good notes in lecture and keeping up with the readings, you should be able to get full scores quite easily. I'm a CS major and writing isn't my strong suit but even I managed to get full scores on the reflections.

One of the things I really liked about the course is how we have take-home writing-based exams instead of traditional sit-down exams. The midterm involved four short-answers and one essay. It was graded more rigorously than the reflections but you should still be able to get a good score if you pull from your lecture notes and the readings. The final was a 10-page research paper for which we weren't required to use content from the lectures or readings, and there was good flexibility on the topic we wanted to write about.

Overall, this is an excellent GE taught by an excellent professor. Please take this class, you won't regret it!