MDST 3504

Professor Etem is very kind and passionate about this class, but it was not a great experience. It was so unorganized, and a few of our assignments were given verbally with no rubric. She then critiqued these assignments harshly, which was unfair because we had no specific instructions to begin with. The courseload is unrealistic. Also, students taught 75% of the course by way of presentations. She obviously cares about the topic, but she almost gave us too much information. She taught by reading straight from a paper, so class was not very engaging. Also, the final project is a 20 page paper, on top of everything else. She expects capstone level work from this course. This might've just been the case for this semester, but I would recommend not taking this course for a Global Media requirement.

I would not recommend this course at all. The expectations for this course were incredibly unclear. On the syllabus, it was stated that we would have two film reports to write throughout the semester. Halfway through the semester, we were all confused as to when the reports would be due, as there was no due date on Canvas or any verbal communication about them. Turns out, there was another group report assignment that was created instead that we were only told about it a week before it was due. Also, she only gave lectures for 4 weeks before students started teaching the class. Some days we would come to class and she would randomly assign a discussion post about the readings or films and never graded them. Her expectation is that each student would make a "leadership presentation" where we would basically teach the course material for the day and create a handout to supplement the presentation. There was basically no instruction after the second week of September. In general, the readings were complicated and seemed to be meant for graduate students who want to concentrate in Turkish Cinema. Given that we are undergraduates who do not have this deep of an interest in the topic, this course was not a good fit for a majority of the class. If you are not an expert in or seriously passionate about Turkish cinema, do NOT take this course. Finally, the final paper was a group paper that had a word count minimum of 5,000 words or roughly 20 pages. This is what is expected of graduate students; even for the undergraduate capstone, the page count is only about 15 pages or 20 pages MAX. This course should not be taught to undergraduate students. I have never taken a course that was so disorganized where nothing was communicated clearly or timely.