RELB 2054

Professor Oertle is very enthusiastic about Buddhism, and the fact that she's a native Swiss speaker leads to some cute word pronunciations/mannerisms (ex. dogs were called "doggies" the whole semester). I'm not sure that I left the course with a super clear idea of Buddhism, but that might be because so many of the topics are interconnected and complex. Readings are dry but pretty short. No grade yet on my final paper, but the midterm was a video project that was relatively fun to make and graded pretty generously. Would recommend this course, especially to other Religious Studies major looking to fulfill their diversity requirement.

Hands down this is the easiest class you will take at UVA. On the first day of class we were told that we only had to take notes if we felt like it, as there was not going to be any tests/quizzes on content from class. The only quizzes were weekly online quizzes about our readings, and these quizzes were two questions and you didn't have to do the reading to get the answers. There was also a weekly reflection, which only took maybe 10 minutes and you could talk about really anything as long as it was loosely associated with something from class. The midterm is a powerpoint presentation, which shouldn't be hard to get a 100 on as long as you are in a good group. The final is a 1400 word reflection, and this took me maybe 4 hours tops to write. Overall the class was a nice break from the normal grind, and also fulfills your Nonwestern perspective requirement (it also fulfills a humanity requirement for religious studies)