Justice Wright

CPR E 494

General Education Reflection

March 15, 2019

Generally Well-Rounded

Over my four-year journey at Iowa State, I, like all other students who entered without an

A.A. degree, took fifteen credits of general education electives along the way. General

education is quite a weird term for those courses however, as while these classes may on the

surface level seem to offer a broad generalized area of study, I found that almost all of these

classes that I took actually had broad applications to engineering. Simply put, my core courses

were teaching me how to engineer, while my general education courses taught me how to be an

engineer.

I took two philosophy courses during my time at Iowa State. The classes were

philosophy of science and philosophy of technology. While these classes more obviously

correlate directly to engineering more than most gen-eds, they had both expected and

unexpected impacts on my approaches to engineering. The obvious tie ins were the focuses of

the class content. Things like intellectual property rights, open source software, and defining a

solid definition for technology/science respectively were the central discussion points of many

lectures, all of which are relevant questions whose answers help shape an ethical framework for

an engineer. The larger takeaway I have from these classes though, was unrelated to the

subject matter at all, topical as it may have been. Philosophy at its core teaches more about the

way people think than it does the things they think about. It gave me tools to examine my

methodologies when approaching problems, and how to understand how other lines of

reasoning might rationally lead to different conclusions. These skills help me challenge myself
and be more conscious of the approach I force upon engineering problems when first examining

them. Knowing this, and being able to reexamine with this in mind has been an invaluable skill.

While philosophy may have helped me develop the tools to know what to say, my

communications course taught me that how you say it can be just as important. While most

engineers are not nearly as socially inept in my experience as popular culture would make them

out to be, proper communication skills are still a vital skill that typically tends to go vastly

underdeveloped. Engineers in today’s world need to develop skills to communicate effectively

with everyone from fellow engineers, to coworkers in other departments, to clients or

beneficiaries half a world away. The communications course I took gave me the most valuable

skill to have in planning communication for any of these situations: the ability to know and speak

to your audience’s needs. This one simple skill has helped me immensely in my professional

life, as I noticed a drastic increase in the attention I received from prospective employers by just

tailoring my language towards their expectations.

I could go down the list of every general education course I took and elaborate on how

sociology taught me to view my projects impacts on a culture at large, or how intro to philosophy

made me question some of my core assumptions, but the broader application of those

anecdotes is simply that these courses, while wide in scope, can directly impact your identity as

an engineer if you let them. We live in an ever increasingly global society, and as that happens

all fields will become increasingly intermingled. It’s no wonder that so many seemingly

disjointed disciplines can directly impact engineers and engineering culture.