Erik Bleich

The class had a lot of readings, but besides readings there was not too much other work. Prof. Bleich is very passionate and I enjoyed his teaching style. The readings were often more complicated than necessary, but I enjoyed the material.

This class has some interesting material if you are interested in comparative politics. Professor Bleich is certainly passionate about the material but his lectures feel inauthentic and they are not the most engaging. He assigns way too much reading for the difficulty of the class and just ends up reviewing the readings during lecture. The readings are often repetitive and just way too time-consuming for the quality of the lectures.

This class has some interesting material if you are interested in comparative politics. Professor Bleich is certainly passionate about the material but his lectures feel inauthentic and they are not the most engaging. He assigns way too much reading for the difficulty of the class and just ends up reviewing the readings during lectur …Read more

I originally took this class since I really enjoy data science/analysis and thought a formal class on text based data would be useful. I was very wrong. We used a set of Python Jupyter notebooks for our analysis that were precoded pipelines not by Bleich who teaches the class but his “colleague” who is a professor from a different college entirely. As a result, we did not learn any useful coding or data analysis methods that could be applied to future projects .

Additionally, the course is taught as a semester long group project where you do “research” using the notebooks. This included two versions of a literature review, a presentation, and “notebook checks” to make sure we were up to date. For the literature review, there was a first version that was graded with feedback. We got a decent grade and used the feedback to update and improve our first version. When we received a grade for our second version, we were very confused by the fact that we had been given a much lower grade. This continued throughout the semester. 

Furthermore, there were only 5 groups, but the professor did not seem to be up to date on what students were working on. This manifested into a strange situation where we received feedback on our assignment one day and the very next day in class he seemed to have no idea what our project was on despite (hopefully) spending some time reading our work before giving out grades. 

While I did end up with a good grade in the end and the people in my group were super nice and helpful, I would not recommend this course. Instead, I would recommend either a class in the math/stat department or PSCI 0210 when Burt Johnson is teaching since you learn how to code in R and Professor Johnson is super kind and an amazing professor.

I originally took this class since I really enjoy data science/analysis and thought a formal class on text based data would be useful. I was very wrong. We used a set of Python Jupyter notebooks for our analysis that were precoded pipelines not by Bleich who teaches the class but his “colleague” who is a professor from a different co …Read more