Arnoldo Montoya-Gamez

General Education Reflection

Having taken many general education courses, I would say they were all important in one way or
another. But the most important in my opinion were the communication and leadership courses,
(COMST101 & LDST322). The thing that in my opinion makes them important is the way I deal with
people.

First off, my speech course COM ST 101 is very useful because it taught me to communicate with
others in general. Having had 3 internships so far, I have had to both present, lead meetings, and also
communicate with my peers and present ideas. Having that said, without my advanced communication
and speech ability, which advanced in this course, I would not have been as successful. I now know
how to develop a good speech, how to think about some topic, and organize it in such a way I’m a
more efficient communicator. That is how Com St 101 has helped me be a professional engineer.

The other general education course I took that I thought was extremely useful was LD ST 322
(Leadership Styles and Strategies in a Diverse Society). This has helped me understand that we are all
different, no matter the background, and everyone always brings something to the table. This helps me
and my peers come up with the best solutions to the hardest problems, without anyone bringing
someone down for being different.

This leadership course also helped me understand my leadership style, my strengths and my
weaknesses. Which is useful because I can always try to mold my leadership style to teams, and ensure
I don’t try something i’m not so great at. Also, it helps me work on the things I’m generally not great
at.

These courses help not only in the engineering sense, but potentially help me make an impact globally.
Especially my leadership course. This is because that course also helped me understand the importance
of diversity. One specific thing it helped me realize was, If there is diversity in a global product, the
people with different backgrounds will help you think about issues different parts of the world area
dealing with. It actually hit me in my last internship, I was working on an android app that was being
used globally, and I made language assumptions, due to my limited background (Spanish and English),
that do not apply to russian. A russian friend told me how my approach would work locally, but not
globally, and I ended up compensating for other languages, and getting feedback from more peers with
different backgrounds to ensure we were doing what we should have.