Professor Garcia is legit the BEST, SWEETEST, most CARING professor you will likely ever have-in your life. Not only is she amazing but her and my TA (madison) really do their best to teach you relevant information that will get you a job. This is the most useful class I have ever taken and we get to make a project that will lead to a job, internship, post grad ops. One of the softwares we learn about is Tableau, and when I had an interview for an internship I mentioned that I learned how to use Tableau and that really got their attention...I got the internship a week later.
How the class works-- you basically spend the whole quarter working on a data visualization project (which is not as hard as you would think, its really interesting) with a group that you choose based off of who is in your discussion. You then spend the next few weeks just working on it.

Just. Take it.

DISCLAIMER: Taken Fall 2021 Hybrid with no exams

If you want a class where you will probably get an A (I mean, just look at the grade distribution) then this will boost your GPA. HOWEVER, it is not a cakewalk. There is a significant amount of work and that can be made very bad if you have a bad group project team. The weekly assignments are pretty doable. The readings are generally not helpful at all or at least there is little incentive to read them because the class mostly revolves around the final project which you work on bit by bit each lab class. Occasionally there will be an assignment that asks about knowledge from the reading, but since it was hybrid and not timed, you could easily read the reading and then answer the assignment without reading all assigned readings.

The TA grades everything. Prof Sanders is really nice but you mostly are interacting with the TA. I recommend understanding the final project rubric and coming up with a good plan on tackling parts of it that are not addressed weekly. For Fall 2021, the biggest thing we had to tackle outside of an assignment was the timeline. For weekly assignments, try to always tie it back to your final project. For example, if asked to make any data visualization, just make one that you would make for your project anyways.

Putting everything on the website itself was by far the hardest part and it is not taught in class. You will already have something to put on your website by around Week 3-4. Try putting it on your website and messing around with the website tools ASAP. That way, if you are struggling, you can ask for help in Week 5 and not Week 10 when everyone else is too and also figuring out that website creation is no joke.

I took this during session c 2020 (during covid) and I really felt like I didn't learn much from this class. Part of that is because the class would really work better in a 10-week format since it culminates in a big group project where you make a website with your classmates. All this being said, it felt like the professor was largely absent. The best instruction I got was from my TA Nina (who was amazing), but the materials and lectures provided by the professor simply didn't apply all that much to the project, which took up much more time than work for the class itself. There were a few busywork type assignments thrown in there that were easy but not useful. I think the part where we focused on data viz software was useful, but there wasn't much guidance there besides youtube video tutorials. Overall, it was a lot of work for little knowledge gained.

I forgot to do my teacher evaluations and I feel bad so this is the next best thing.

This class is one of the most useful I've taken at UCLA. I love that I get to add new skills to my resume (once I build upon them more, of course) and I got to explore a field I had never encountered before. Professor Sanders and my TA Madison Faulis are both amazing, helpful, knowledgeable people. Assignments never felt pointless, there was always a purpose.

I will say taking this class during summer session made it more difficult than what my friend had described during the school year. It was hard to keep up with everything with other classes too. The professor did remove some of the website requirements that otherwise would've been required during the rest of the school year, so I blame most of this on my own bad time management and group project dynamics.

Even though I tried my best, and I felt like my assignments weren't the strongest still, the TA and Professor always had something nice and constructive to say which made me feel so much better about my work and even myself.

Take this class!

For context I took this class online during summer session C 2020 (Covid times). I assume the 6 week course is fairly different from the 10 week course so ymmv. The class had a pretty heavy workload in terms of individual and group projects with at least 2 or 3 assignments due each week, but I didn't feel like the assignments were particularly challenging as long as you have a solid group to work with, and they graded very generously.

However, I didn't feel like I learned much in the course and my group members echoed the same sentiment. The asynchronous format sucked, there were only a few lectures and the 50 minute labs once a week were too short to really learn much. Overall it felt like there simply wasn't much content in the course. I enjoyed working on the project and learning about the data visualization techniques and mapping, but I simply don't feel like I gained much from taking this class.