Hands down one of the best professors in the AAS department. I took professor Welty for two courses and both courses taught by her were some of my favorite AAS courses taken at UCLA. She's incredibly helpful and only wants her students to succeed. She's incredibly approachable and doesn't make you feel nervous about speaking up in class and sharing your opinion. There are a lot of readings and work for the class, but the readings and pretty interesting. Highly recommend taking any of Professor Welty's class!

Lecture:
Professor Welty uses lecture slides as a foundation for her lectures, and she comments on the slides. Her slides are not posted online, so I would recommend attending lectures. She tells you when it is unnecessary to copy down the information, such as statistics and quotes. I thoroughly enjoyed the course and found the topics interesting and relatable. Sometimes, she would show videos to illustrate her point. There will be some lectures where she would show a film and have you answer some questions and turn it in at the end of class. In general, Professor Welty is very engaging, and I looked forward to going to her lectures.

Discussion:
The discussion is made up of a short presentation by students each week and a discussion about that week's readings. I had to write six one-page reading reflection journals, which were graded very easily. Attending discussions is crucial to your grade, and you should try to engage in the discussions to earn more points. One absence = 3% marked off your grade, two absences =9% marked off your grade, three absences = 27% marked off your grade, etc.

Grade:
This is an essay GE to get an A in as long as you put in a little bit of effort. There is a midterm and a final. They both include passage identifications, which ask you to identify the key term and you will need to write about what it is and why it is important. Then, you also need to write an essay to answer one out of a few prompts. You will need to relate these to specific examples from the readings or the films. The midterm and final are both pretty easy as long as you study a little bit. There is a 6-8 page essay, and you are allowed to write about anything related to Asian American studies. Part of your grade for that is based on turning in an outline and a working draft. Discussion makes up a large portion of your grade too - this includes attendance, participation, and a group presentation. Also, there are occasional worksheets to fill out based on videos that you need to watch for homework. There are readings assigned that you are supposed to finish before each lecture, but they are really only to aid your understanding of the topic. The readings assigned are very long and sometimes boring, but Professor Welty will teach you that you only need to read the introduction, conclusion, and the first sentence of each body paragraph. You will need to buy a textbook called Contemporary Asian America, The New Chinese America, and The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. There are several opportunities to earn extra credit, such as going to a museum or attending a guest lecture. At the end of the quarter, you turn in a self-reflection to suggest what grade you think you deserve, and the TA takes it into consideration before assigning you a grade.

Grade Breakdown:
Midterm: 20%
Final: 30%
Paper: 25%
Section: 20%
Film Responses: 5%

Professor Welty is an amazing professor that is engaging and funny in lectures! This has been one of my favorite classes so far. This is an "easy G.E." where you'll do well only if you're well-engaged and understand the material (which isn't that difficult). The only downside to this is that there is quite a bit of reading accompanying *each lecture*.

Also, I'm selling the three textbooks needed for the class. Just email me at *************

From what I've heard about other GE's, this is definitely one of the more work-intensive ones. According to the syllabus, students are expected to read 4 hours per lecture, which in my opinion, is a lot of reading in addition to weekly reflections, tem paper, and other small homework assignments. The professor was very nice, but she was not the greatest at lecturing. The TA's were ok at best, mostly because they didn't help much, even at office hours. There were a multitude of extra credit assignments and other random assignments to pad your grade. Participation during discussions is important as well. They did not post individual grades on myUCLA, but I assume that our quarterly reflection on the grade we deserve in the class is heavily considered in assigning grades. I would do this class only if you are super passionate about Asian American studies. I did learn a lot, but there was a lot of effort needed.

Professor Welty is a great lecturer, and this class was overall very easy, but there is a LOT of readings assigned each week and you must resist developing a habit of skipping them while focusing on your other major related courses.
There is one group presentation during discussion and one research paper that you have to write but the grading is pretty lenient.
The students get to choose what will be on the midterm and final (in class they just ask us to shout out various vocab words and topics).
Midterm contains about 2-3 identification questions which is a brief paragraph response for each ID, and then an essay prompt where you choose 1 out of 4 prompts.
Final has roughly the same structure, except there's a couple more ID questions.
Attendance is crucial. Lectures are not podcasted and her slides are not posted online, and if you skip a discussion section, they'll deduct 3% of your overall grade at the end of the quarter, and for each additional section you skip, they'll raise the percentage to powers of 3 (2nd offense: 9%, 3rd offense: 27%, etc)

Professor Welty’s lectures are very engaging and generally include a few film clips in betweeen so that you won’t need to take notes all the time. No one did tok terrible on midterm and final, as the questions are not so hard as long as you don’t answer them without any studying. However, there are 3 things to note:

1. Welty NEVER post her lecture slides online, so if you want to ditch a lecture, you should have a very good reason to conpensate.

2. For those of you with an international background, especially those who come to US for college, DO NOT mistake this class as an easy GE. According to one of my international friends who is also in the class, the readings are going to be challenging and time-consuming, and if you are not serious enough studying for the tests, you will get 60s or even fail while watching the rest of the class getting high 80s, 90s, or even 100.

3. Speaking of the readings, DO NOT read every word. Skimming the intro and conclusion paragraph and then read the first sentence are generally enough for you to understand the big ideas.

I hope the information above can help you decide whether to take the class as a GE and how to do well in it.

I highly enjoyed the topics we covered in this class. Professor Welty is an engaging lecturer, and well versed in issues that pertained to the Asian American community in the past and now. I am selling The New Chinese America for $23, it is in perfect condition. Email me at ************* if interested.