Your grade in this class heavily depends on your TA! For the Fall portion of this cluster, your grade mainly consists of your midterm (an in-class essay), a commercial analysis paper, and a book analysis paper. Your TA grades all of these, so make sure that you form a good relationship with them and go to their office hours in order to make your papers as seamless as possible!

There are 4 professors that teach this class, my favorite one being Professor Vavreck, who is super concise and straightforward about the information she presents to you. The other professors are also great, and I highly recommend attending each lecture in order to completely understand the context of the situations you will be writing about.

Overall, this portion of the cluster was not bad, though it was definitely a lot of work to get through. I would mainly recommend this class in order to secure 6 units and to knock off some GEs.

This class is the main reason I was extremely stressed during the fall and winter quarters. Every Wednesday night I was staying up until 4-ish AM just to finish all the readings, which didn't even feel relevant to the lectures.

However, I felt that the class itself had very interesting material. Despite hurting both my mental health and my sleep schedule, I would take this class again because the lectures were genuinely interesting.

OK the 60s Cluster is pretty difficult but Vavreck is a gem among the teaching staff. I found it really hard to engage with most of the other professor's lectures the majority of the time, but Vavreck's were always good. As a whole the class was a lot of work and if I hadn't had the rigorous English teachers in high school that I did I think it would've been a lot harder. What can make the class difficult is that there is a bunch of material every week to go through (readings and recordings) before discussion. The Thursday webinars are interesting to listen to, but honestly never helped me with writing a paper or even synthesizing the information. The discussions sections are probably the most helpful part. Seriously if you don't know what to do about an essay go make an appointment with the writing consultant or schedule a meeting with your TA to go over stuff.

Vavreck was my favorite out of the four professors! She teaches the political science portion of the class, and I definitely found her material the most interesting. She's also a pretty esteemed person outside of UCLA. I would have loved to take a class of hers outside this cluster.

Okay honestly, compared to other clusters, this cluster is NOT that bad at all. It's perfect for STEM majors that want to knock out 4 GEs (Literary, Visual, Historical, Social) but don't want to be bored to death. Attendance is not required/taken during lecture, but the lectures aren't posted online so I recommend taking the extra step to just go every lecture so that you're not making up for it later. I took this class because it seemed like the fun cluster, with music and politics, but don't forget about the history and English aspects! Professor Decker, who teaches the Literature, Film/TV lectures is so dull, but I'm surprised I haven't fallen asleep alongside my friends. His voice is very monotone and he often goes off on unrelated tangents that stray away from what he is trying to say. He means well, but sometimes it's hard to focus on the words he says when you've just woken up. Professor Reiff is only slightly more interesting because she sometimes discusses interesting topics, but most of the time its just a bunch of words - like full-on paragraphs - on a lecture slide and before you know it class is over and you have no recollection of what she said. The best Professors are Vavreck and Fink because they like to engage with the class with questions or opinions, they seem excited and awake, and they make jokes as best as they can. There is no final for this class, only a midterm, and the TAs usually prepare their sections pretty well with what to expect. The Literature Paper and Political Science polling paper are designed to be vague and open-ended, so just remember to specify your topic a little bit and make sure you have something to say, theme-wise. Overall, I didn't think I was going to get an A because I'm not that great at papers...and also because they never posted the grades for the assignments online....but anyway it's possible!