<p>So I signed up for the GE Cluster American in the 60s cause I thought it seemed pretty interesting; I love American history, particular 20th century and I especially love political discussion.</p>
<p>The only thing is, my some friends at UCLA who are now sophomores took clusters last year (different subjects of course) and they all hated it. They said it was extremely intense, difficult, and soooooooo much work. LOTS OF READING AND WRITING ALL YEAR LONG! Are clusters that great of a hell and dramatically and intensely harder than just taking other regular GEs and Writing II to satisfy the requirements?</p>
<p>Well yea, but the difficulty is offset by interest. It's far easier reading 200 pages a week of books you are interested in than even 50 pages that you are not interested in. And the same goes that it's easier writing four papers on a subject you like than two that you don't.
You can always drop it after first, second quarter and still get the same ge credit for that course. Only thing is make sure you actually really enjoy that subject. I found out afterwards that my interest in english literature didn't translate immediately to philosophy for History of Modern Thought, but I still fared alrt.</p>
<p>i took the 60s cluster last year and I thought the first quarter was particularly chill. No final. just a very fair midterm and two papers. And one of the papers was really easy; you basically generate a data table from poll information and interpret what that table might mean. No wrong answers for this paper.</p>
<p>And then you can always drop the cluster after the first quarter if you don't like it as much as you thought you would. the cluster does get harder after the first quarter, but not by a lot. Don't feel like you have to commit to a cluster; I think that's the biggest problem people have. As soon as you think you might not like it that much, go ahead and drop it, don't suffer another quarter. As for the writing II requirement and honors units and seminar credit that you'll miss out when you drop a cluster, I've found that I would've fulfilled all those requirements anyways just by taking other GEs that I like.</p>
<p>i think the clusters can be very hit or miss. i absolutely loved the spring quarter seminar that i took, but didn't particularly enjoy the first two quarters; not that it was insanely hard or anything like that, it just wasn't that interesting. after my first year, i took a lot of random ge classes, and wished that i had done that from the beginning. there's a lot of interesting ge classes out there; sometimes, it's not so much the subject itself than it is the professor who can make the class so engaging. in hindsight, i wish i just took the ge classes.</p>
<p>looking back, i probably did the most busy work in my ge cluster. but this is because i really like the material and wanted to read all the assigned reading. it really does depend on whether you like what you're studying. i took the work, labor, and social justice cluster and it totally challenged a lot of my views and was a great way to start off ucla</p>
<p>on the other hand, the cosmos cluster was horridly blasphemously disastrously terrible.</p>