Professor
Felipe Goncalves
Most Helpful Review
Spring 2020 - YES YES YES! Professor Goncalves is everything you want out of an Econ 11 professor. Spring 2020 was is first quarter at UCLA (I believe he did some post-doc work in NY after graduating from Princeton) and he blew all my expectations out of the water. Especially during all the chaos with the pandemic/BLM protests, he was super understanding and tried to make the best out of the situation. His lectures are very clear, and he goes through a ton of examples to really solidify the content (side note: he REALLY listens to student feedback; he adjusted the difficulty of the 2nd midterm/final after looking over the results of the 1st midterm, for example). He sometimes holds review sessions before exams, and a TON of extra office hours during midterm and final season (use them)! The material of econ 11 is obviously very challenging--the class is a weeder for a reason--but Prof. Goncalves is an absolute gem of the econ department. The grade distribution for Spring 2020 is inflated because tests were open note due to corona, but even if this class was in-person, I'd take this class again in a heartbeat. If I had one complaint about this class, it's the "flipped classroom" structure where you learn the content by watching pre-recorded lectures and lecture is a Q&A session, but this is really more a complaint about the constraints of COVID.
Spring 2020 - YES YES YES! Professor Goncalves is everything you want out of an Econ 11 professor. Spring 2020 was is first quarter at UCLA (I believe he did some post-doc work in NY after graduating from Princeton) and he blew all my expectations out of the water. Especially during all the chaos with the pandemic/BLM protests, he was super understanding and tried to make the best out of the situation. His lectures are very clear, and he goes through a ton of examples to really solidify the content (side note: he REALLY listens to student feedback; he adjusted the difficulty of the 2nd midterm/final after looking over the results of the 1st midterm, for example). He sometimes holds review sessions before exams, and a TON of extra office hours during midterm and final season (use them)! The material of econ 11 is obviously very challenging--the class is a weeder for a reason--but Prof. Goncalves is an absolute gem of the econ department. The grade distribution for Spring 2020 is inflated because tests were open note due to corona, but even if this class was in-person, I'd take this class again in a heartbeat. If I had one complaint about this class, it's the "flipped classroom" structure where you learn the content by watching pre-recorded lectures and lecture is a Q&A session, but this is really more a complaint about the constraints of COVID.