HIEU 2041

The Good: Professor Meyer is an exceptionally good lecturer and every class was engaging and interesting. Lectures were accompanied by handouts that had all the key points for the lecture, so the lectures were easy to follow and the handouts were useful to revisit the essential topics. Professor Meyer is also extremely knowledgeable and very clearly passionate about classics, so if you ever need help her office hours are always an excellent option. She also fielded questions at the beginning of every lecture, so anyone who claims that they did not have the resources to properly learn or prepare themselves did not take advantage of those resources that were available.

The Bad: It is no secret that this course is a substantial amount of effort. Weekly reading assignments ranged approximately from 80 to 120 pages per week. By nature, the course must cover a lot of material since it spans 1100 years. The studying required for the midterm and final may also seem excessive, since they both cover a lot of material, although the final is not cumulative.

With that said, the studying is extremely simple. Each week has a list of terms to know and it was not difficult to just pull the necessary information from the weekly readings. This was far from my highest effort class of the semester, so I succeeded by doing the weekly reading and paying attention to the lectures while keeping an eye on the important topics for the week. When exam time came I just compiled the information into flash cards and studied for a few hours.

If you put in the work, you will learn a *ton* about Rome. If that appeals to you, take the course. Just don't take the class if you're not interested in the subject (duh) or if you want a free A.

I would not recommend taking this class if it isn't a requirement for your major. Like some of the previous reviews said, it's pretty tedious -- the readings are long, the course schedule is odd, and the lectures are hit or miss in terms of being useful for learning the material. I did well in the class, but a lot of it came down to teaching myself key info before the exams. If you are good at memorizing terms and skimming to get the gist of readings, you will do fine. Still, the professor and TA do not make it easy to do well. The professor is very knowledgeable and approachable, but she doesn't respond to her emails consistently, which can make it difficult to schedule meetings if you have class during her office hours. The TA this spring, Kayla, was not great at facilitating discussion and gave the impression that she just had no idea what was going on in the class. That didn't stop her from grading exams and papers harshly, though. #tCFS24

If you don't have to take this class and still do, mad respect to you. Don't get me wrong, I personally love Roman history and Dr Meyer is a brilliant historian who regularly shows off her impressive knowledge in lecturing and answering student questions. However, the heavy reading load and somewhat awkward scheduling of this class (MW lecture with W discussion) are a really turn-off. As I understand it, the ~120 page a week load isn't even the high end of what Meyer assigns, but buying 2 course packets and something like 6 texts really isn't an appealing concept, nor did it usually feel realistic for me to complete all of the week's reading amidst my other obligations. Hence, the way I made it through this class was not one of doing all the work. Some of it, such as the paper(s) and the associated reading, were unavoidable, but I was able to walk the line of not doing a lot of the reading -- not something I do not recommend trying if you don't have substantial previous knowledge of Rome and/or a high ability to write about things even with little information. Honestly, I'm still not sure I deserved the grade I got in the class but some random clutch and the mercy of the TA (shoutouts Kayla!) were enough to pull me through.

If you do take this, make sure you have enough space in your week to keep up with the material better than I did.

PS Discussion section felt kinda useless (nothing against the TA, just a factor of the course).

#tCFS24

Perhaps my worst academic decision up to date, If you are looking to fulfill a requirement for general education look elsewhere (my issue). As someone who majors in something unrelated to this class, don't take it unless its a major requirement. Readings are uneccesarily abundant and are not gone over in lecture, discussion is fine but don't expect to get much from it either. Dreaded studying for this midterm and final, overall an uneccesarily hard class for the "reward". Also Meyer is a very hard line teacher not really forgiving in any way (not something she should be proud of TBH). I hope this serves as a warning for all those considering this class.

I'm a history major and took this class for the pre-1700 European history requirement. While I wasn't exactly expecting it to be easy, it was extremely tedious. Hours and hours of reading a week that while you can get by not reading word for word, was extremely intimidating. Professor Meyer is very knowledgeable about the subject so if it's a topic you're interested in, I would recommend the class, however, if you're just looking to satisfy the requirement, I would not recommend. The set up of the course involves 5-6 books, a textbook, and course packet with a dozen or so terms to know each week. The exams and paper are based on these terms and books. While I received a good grade in the class, the gravity of dread that surrounded the course was not worth it to me.

Do not take this class if you are not a Classics major. The amount of reading assigned is killer (for those of you who actually read the assignments), and the lectures are just extremely brief overviews of history (spanning 700 BC-400 AD). Although you can be expected to know the minute details, Meyer will never cover them in class. Instead, she talks about broad themes of history (which are useful for essay portions on tests). But sometimes, she'll just waste entire classes by showing you how to put on a toga or having a debate with her husband about Christianity. Although interesting, they had no relevance to anything you would be tested on. The papers were assigned on entire books (each about 500 pages long) that you had to read outside of the 150-200 pages a week. The class is brutal and not very rewarding.