If you like Medieval lit, you'll love this class. He is very knowledgeable about the context and gives lots of supplemental readings. However, he often talks around the text and won't reference it directly or explain any wording. Daily discussion posts and a reading or two a week. Take at your discretion, but was also a digestible class if you like discussion, as most of your knowledge will come from meeting 1:1 or from other students. He's down to talk about pretty much anything and really does just want you to learn from his class!

Class breakdown:
pair oral presentation
8 page paper on whatever you want
daily discussion posts (250 words minimum)

I LOVED this course as it provided a fresh perspective on the sentient nature of animals and shed light on the meat processing industry. Professor Arvind was an exceptional instructor, displaying genuine enthusiasm for the subject that significantly enhanced his teaching style. However, I would caution against enrolling in this class if the topic doesn't align with your interests, as it demands a substantial amount of extra work and readings.

I took this fiat lux because I was interested in the subject and I loved it! The assigned readings were genuinely interesting (coming from someone who usually doesn’t like reading but does have interest in this topic) and changed a lot of my perspectives. Class is a lot more fun when you participate in the discussion, and if you don’t the instructor would call on you to speak anyways. The workload wasn’t much, just reading and then writing a 250 word response and posting it in a discussion post on canvas. The readings could get a bit long for a fiat lux in my opinion, but it would be easy to skim and still write a response, although it's much more interesting when you read.

The Fiat Lux was really enjoyable. Readings selected were engaging and didn’t take too long to do and provided you were willing to engage with the very discursive format, the class was very approachable.

a good fiat lux freshmen seminar class if ur interested in animal rights and welfare. not worth taking if u r not interested in the previously mentioned topics as it is graded pass/fail as with all other fiat lux freshmen seminars and only counts 4 1 credit. workload was a bit heavy 4 1 credit imo with 40 page readings and accompanying 250 word reflection discussion posts typically assigned weekly 4 sunday night at 12:00 although late assignments were accepted. discussions were interesting although sometimes held over zoom which made total participation difficult 4 the prof 2 accomplish and somewhat dulled the content of the course. professor thomas is a super intelligent, thoughtful, and j generally interesting man although i sometimes felt as though he misinterpreted my comments when paraphrasing them 2 the class (undoubtedly unintentionally). i would take this course again if i cld, i found the somewhat scientific and analytical approach to such a topic usually coded in terms of morality and ethicality rly refreshing and fascinating and have no doubt i would learn more from repeating the class. in all honesty, however, i rarely completed the readings and wld usually skim a couple of paragraphs before producing my discussion comment which was almost always late. my apologies prof thomas and ty 4 a wonderful introduction 2 ucla!!

Professor Thomas is amazing. The class is interesting at times, just a LOT of work. A lot of reading, a lot of writing, group project, and a 10 page research paper at the end of the quarter.

I want to believe Professor Thomas is a cool person, but his lectures are very unorganized. Then again, I only really watched about 5/20 of them. After the first week, the class pretty much decided that we had no way of keeping track of exactly what he was really talking about. There were no lecture slides and he liked to skip around with his topics, or worse, spend half an hour going on a tangent. Depending on your TA, you might not even need to watch lecture or do readings(keep in mind this is COVID-19 time). For my TA, our papers were close readings of a work. This really means that I only had to read three works. I'm not a huge medieval fan so I was happy with that.
When I did watch lecture to see if I could gather any contextualization/deeper insight into the work I was close reading, Professor Thomas didn't really provide anything substantial or mind-blowing to help. TAs decide your grade.

The enlarged photo from his Bruinwalk pfp is Arvind petting a cat.
10A with Professor Thomas was actually pretty good. You truly get only what you put into the course. A lot of people really get bored with medieval lit and it becomes a struggle for them to stay awake. Arvind definitely knows that and he actually feels remorseful that he has to teach some of the boring texts in this course. While he's lecturing, he's so professional and rigid, but once the class is over and you talk to him he's just a goo-prone human like the rest of us. He nervously cracks jokes and apologizes profusely for being too boring or taking a little while to screen share. Bottom line is that Professor Thomas is extremely caring and he wants you to actually be excited about the literature vs be intimidated by it. He brings on cool guest lecturers like Mac Harris and Michael Calabrese to modernize/contextualize these texts with pop-culture allusions. The running themes of the class were fairly consistent throughout each lecture, I'm surprised they were not a focal point of the essays. The class solely consisted of 3 essays and participation, it's kind of a cinch — the topics are cool. The only real downside is that Prof doesn't use slides and the engagement during lectures only goes so far. On the first day, there were 170 people on the Zoom and on the last day, there were 30. Stanely Wu is a remarkable TA. I had so much fun in their section, and they are super eager to help students if they are struggling as I was on a couple of the essays. Great sense of humor and a fast grader as well. I would take it again, but I would definitely try to be more present and show up for the live lecture more often than just watching the recordings.