Professor
Stefan Timmermans
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Most Helpful Review
Winter 2021 - This Fiat Lux is super interesting and engaging! The topic matter was relevant to current events and very informative. The only thing that was not ideal about the class was that because it was every other week each seminar was 2 hours of straight discussion. At times I found it difficult to concentrate. Otherwise I am very glad I took this class - the readings were short and easy and the discussions were very eye-opening. I will miss Professor Timmermans!
Winter 2021 - This Fiat Lux is super interesting and engaging! The topic matter was relevant to current events and very informative. The only thing that was not ideal about the class was that because it was every other week each seminar was 2 hours of straight discussion. At times I found it difficult to concentrate. Otherwise I am very glad I took this class - the readings were short and easy and the discussions were very eye-opening. I will miss Professor Timmermans!
Most Helpful Review
Professor Timmermans is great lecturer who actually makes a research methods class interesting. He has some of the most organized and easy to follow lectures I have encountered. The book is not necessary at all; the midterm and final (both multiple choice) only cover material from lecture and some online readings. The TAs are great and very helpful. The exams can be tricky, but there is a generous curve that creates a nice grade distribution. Overall, I highly recommend Timmermans for this class.
Professor Timmermans is great lecturer who actually makes a research methods class interesting. He has some of the most organized and easy to follow lectures I have encountered. The book is not necessary at all; the midterm and final (both multiple choice) only cover material from lecture and some online readings. The TAs are great and very helpful. The exams can be tricky, but there is a generous curve that creates a nice grade distribution. Overall, I highly recommend Timmermans for this class.
Most Helpful Review
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.
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.
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2018 - 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
Fall 2018 - 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
Most Helpful Review
If you have any sort of respect for medical professionals and believe that they might be doing even the slightest good for humanity, avoid his Medical Sociology class. He insists on claiming that doctors are only interested in money even if it means hurting their patients. Regardless of what type of factual information from other sources you provide that disprove his beliefs, he will shoot it down and claim it's "not accurate." Perhaps the worst thing is he decided to use a rubric for a paper after we had already turned in the paper. So if you went and found a bunch of third party sources (which he suggested when he assigned the paper) you'd get a lower grade than if you just cited stuff from the books he assigned for reading. To top it all off, he pushes a book he wrote that claims we shouldn't do CPR. He cites some outdated statistics that state that it only helps in a small percentage of situations. Don't even bother trying to point out that CPR is valuable even if it saves just one person's life. Overall, he's a stubborn professor and he picks his TAs to be yes men who will back up whatever he says, even if you provide evidence for every single one of your arguments.
If you have any sort of respect for medical professionals and believe that they might be doing even the slightest good for humanity, avoid his Medical Sociology class. He insists on claiming that doctors are only interested in money even if it means hurting their patients. Regardless of what type of factual information from other sources you provide that disprove his beliefs, he will shoot it down and claim it's "not accurate." Perhaps the worst thing is he decided to use a rubric for a paper after we had already turned in the paper. So if you went and found a bunch of third party sources (which he suggested when he assigned the paper) you'd get a lower grade than if you just cited stuff from the books he assigned for reading. To top it all off, he pushes a book he wrote that claims we shouldn't do CPR. He cites some outdated statistics that state that it only helps in a small percentage of situations. Don't even bother trying to point out that CPR is valuable even if it saves just one person's life. Overall, he's a stubborn professor and he picks his TAs to be yes men who will back up whatever he says, even if you provide evidence for every single one of your arguments.
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