Overall Vibe: 89 is a small honors seminar that you can co-enroll in if you are taking Soc 1 (there is also a version for Soc 20 I believe). I LOVED this class, though it may not be everyone's cup of tea. We were pushed to read the same kinds of paper's Dr. Villarreal's PhD students are engaging with, which I thought was a great learning opportunity. The structure was collaborative, and I find small environments (about 10 students) to be much more conducive to learning than big lectures. Honestly I learned much more in this course than in the Soc 1 co-requisite lecture.

Exams: No exams :)

Readings: 1 academic article or study per week. These could be dense and a challenge to understand at times, but Dr. Villarreal was encouraging and acknowledged that it may be difficult. As long as I engaged critically with the material, any challenges or misunderstandings with absorbing the material did not hurt my grade; I truly felt like the purpose of this class was to stretch myself and learn in a supportive environment. I found most of the studies he selected to be really interesting and topical (a lot on race, gender, and immigration as these relate to employment and other life outcomes in modern America).

Papers: We wrote a short, 1-page double-spaced reflection each week. These were due Sunday at 8 am before the Monday seminar meeting. At first I was not thrilled by the Sunday 8 am deadline. However, I came to appreciate the reasoning behind this: Dr. Villarreal literally prints out every single one of our reflections and spends a few hours of his Sunday reading through them and making notes on points he wanted us to bring up in the discussion. For those who complain he was not engaged in our learning in the soc 1 lecture, I think it is just because there are so many students (200+). His 89 course showed me he clearly cares about helping students to learn and probably the lecture is just a difficult environment in which to provide 1:1 support or feedback. Anyways, the papers were not difficult but did force everyone to read the article and at least have something to say in class. In a lot of my other discussions it is easy to show up without reading the article (I even do that from time to time sadly) but this reflection really forces you to read and try to understand as much of the material as possible which makes for a great class discussion. I received a 95% on all of my reflections.

Participation: As long as you show up and speak (he makes sure to call on everyone when moderating the discussion) and submit your weekly reflection, you will receive full participation credit. Also, you are allowed to miss 2 reflection assignments with no penalty to your grade.

Additional Advice: Go to his office hours! I regret that I never went. Dr. Villarreal is an extremely accomplished researcher and I feel like he would've had lots of interesting advice in OH.

Key Takeaways:
-Dr. Villarreal is very personable
-The weekly articles were quite interesting
-Take this class if you have any interest in social science research, or just want to actually stretch your learning in a class without it being stressful
-Take this class if you prefer small, discussion-based learning environments
-You do not need a sociology background to take this class or find the material interesting
-Again, even though the material is a challenge, this will NOT hurt your grade! The class is all about showing up, stretching your thinking, and showing that you are engaging with the material

This class is an honors seminar that's meant to be taken in conjunction with Sociology 1. The seminar only meets once a week for 50 minutes, so it's not that much of a commitment, but there was some difficulty to understanding the research articles we were supposed to read and discuss every week (the main component of the class). It was also rather hard to come up with insightful commentary to put in the one-page weekly memos, but with time one gets better at it. On the bright side, you're only required to write 6 the entire quarter so there are three weeks where you can take a break. Villarreal was good at starting conversations, but the weekly discussions were more of us shelling out our opinions one at a time to him than a discussion between peers. Overall, a valuable seminar that lets you dive a bit deeper into Sociology 1 content and gives you a good outlet to get to know the professor in a smaller setting!

Nothing grand, though the class might be fun for anyone interested in sociology. The assignments were just weekly 1-page reflections on the assigned reading for the week - the reflections were graded, though I'm not 100% sure what the criteria was (the averages pretty much stabilized 90-95 by week 3). The readings were, for the most part, research papers related to the topic covered that week in SOCIOL 1. In terms of the actual class period, the professor would usually give a 30-minute talk related to the reading, then ask the class to discuss/give opinions on it. (There usually weren't many.) Notably, this class doesn't really feed back into SOCIOL 1 - it won't give you an advantage there, for instance. That being said, I thought the readings were pretty interesting - they were generally a mix of major past studies and a few of the professor's own papers, which I thought was cool.