Professor Anjum is the best! She gives very engaging lectures, has a great sense of humor, and is quite understanding. I took IDS 120 during Spring 2020 and I kind of expected to have learned most of this already, but boy was I wrong! Taking this class solidified that I will (hopefully) be an IDS major!

The workload is reasonable and Professor Anjum generously gave extensions to us. The group project was a little bit stressful, but it ended up fine. Just keep up on the readings, watch the lectures, and you should be fine.

TLDR; TAKE THIS CLASS!!!

Professor Anjum is very knowledgeable in her field. You can easily start a conversation with her and learn a lot from it. She records the lectures and posts the slides after the class. Her lectures are very interactive and interesting. Attendance to the lectures is totally optional. We had readings (which are mostly not too long), videos, and podcasts to do before meeting during the discussion sessions. The material is very interesting and engaging. Attendance and participation during the sessions count for 20% of your grade, the midterm is another 20%, the report is also 20%, the presentation is 15%, and the final is 25%. Her exams are very open-ended in the sense that there is no wrong answer, so as long as you address the essay prompts nicely with some evidence, you will get a good grade. We had review sessions before the exams, and that was very helpful because we got a chance to ask questions and get clarifications. Having the opportunity to listen to the recordings after the prompts were given was also very helpful because most of the time the answers are given during the lecture, and other times they are in the readings. I do not think that this class is hard or tricky in any way. The class also included a group project and you are given 8 weeks to prepare for it. You have to submit a draft, then the final project, and present it during the session. It was stressful because communication during the pandemic is hard and not everyone is responsive and responsible, but the TA (Naiha) is very nice and helps to solve the issues right away. The professor has office hours by appointments only and she gives each student 30 minutes to ask questions individually and discuss the material. I love Professor Erica Anjum and I would definitely take more courses with her!

Professor Anjum is a really cool, understanding person. I feel like starting this review with that because I really liked her but sometimes did not understand where she was going with lectures. Some more direction would have been appreciated. That being said, the project that we did was AMAZING for getting me to understand international development and how to actually plan a development project. Also, I liked how the professor formatted the midterm and final. You could really answer the questions in a unique way instead of within a tight mold, and as long as you had the right material weaved in there you'd get the points. The professor and TAs were also very accommodating given the circumstances, which I appreciated greatly.

She is a wonderful, engaging professor. I will check every quarter to see if she is teaching another class that I can take.