The professor is fantastic, and the class is exciting, especially for pre-med students. The grading system is based on 40% Midterm, 40% Final, 10% Book Reviews, and 10% Discussion Attendance.

The TAs are friendly and relaxed, and active participation in discussions should suffice. The Midterm and Final exams were ten pages each, which felt daunting, but considering the number of readings, it was not a significant problem, just a bit tedious.

WOULD RECOMMEND!

Great professor, interesting class (esp for premeds!). Grade is 40% Midterm, 40% Final, 10% Book Reviews, 10% Disc. attendance. TAs were pretty chill and if you participate in discussions you should be set! The MT/Final were 10 pages each which felt longer than necessary but there were plenty of readings to cover so it wasn't really an issue, just tedious.

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One of the best profs at UCLA! Prof Timmermans is very knowledgable and if you are willing to learn and actually study to gain knowledge, take his class! It's truly informative and covers lots of subjects
and not only death. His unique approach to the exams makes you think and analyze as well as connect social facts to certain events. It's really surprising that people find his class 'unclear" since Timmermans always dedicated the beginning of the lecture to discussing how he wants us to write the midterm and the final(which are 10-page max essays)...Take him if you're willing to acquire new skills in a sociology major and develop new perspectives.

I've only left good reviews for professors and am usually skeptical of negative ones...but I HAVE to let other people know that I wouldn't recommend this class. Timmermans is exceedingly unclear (he did not even have a proper syllabus) and even when responding to the most DIRECT questions, he skirts around giving an actual answer. I'd say the workload is demanding...4 books, at LEAST one or two 20-page-long readings assigned for every class (which must ALL be referenced in the 10-page-long midterm and final papers) - come on.
The class is now called "death, dying, and afterlife" (no longer death, suicide, and trauma), but we haven't talked about the afterlife at ALL! And it seems that we always talk about suicide anyways. Especially Durkheim. Not sure why it was even renamed.
Timmermans is a charismatic guy with interesting lectures, but consensus among my classmates were that his expectations were always either unclear or unreasonable. Even the TA's rolled their eyes at these things.

Grade is based on midterm, final, and 2 book reactions. The midterm and final were both 10 pages each but you're basically just answering questions from a prompt, and if you go to the lectures and take notes you should have no problem. The book reactions were 1 page single space and straight forward, as long as you provided your insight and showed that you read each book you'd get credit. Professor Timmermans is such a good lecturer and keeps the class engaging. Highly recommend taking this class!

Timmermans looks like a morbid version of where's waldo, and in his death, trauma, and society class you start to feel that way. His Belgium-accent and slightly off-colored humor is characteristic of a man who would spend years in a medical examiner's office, watching countless autopsies. Ultimately, Timmermans is a smart ethnographer, his miderm and final are do-able if you do the reading.

Learned a lot in this class, perfect for anyone interested in entering a health care field. Great lecturer, very funny, easily approachable. Class has two quizzes, most people failed the first one I did. Got an A in the class thanks to my amazing TA who told us exactly what our essays needed to include. Mid term and final are two five page essays, so ten pages each. Would definitely take him again.

Great class about all sorts of death that you wouldnt want yourself to be in. Learnt a lot about how different types of death is treated by society as well as the histories behind some of them. Given that Timmermans is a sociology professor, the demands, style and content of this class is quite different from the usual psychology class. Much more focused on ideas, readings and theories and less so on experimental data. if you have some morbid interest in deaths and dying, it is definitely a fun and informative class to take

This class had 2 one page write ups (reaction papers) which everyone recieved 5/5 on as long as they wrote something on a piece of paper, 2 quizzes that were both out of 20 points, the midterm, the final, and discussion attendance/participation. Lectures are interesting and cover the material that will be on the quizzes, but Timmermans does not take attendance and often students miss class and review his PowerPoints that are posted online after lecture. The quizzes were very difficult but a 10 page paper on the readings can be written to make up points for a quiz that a student performed poorly on. The midterm and final are both a 10 page paper on a prompt with multiple dynamics that cover information from readings. Three textbooks were required for this course (one being Timmermans' own), while the homework's articles are posted online. Overall, this class was interesting and the TA's are also awesome!