Shahzaib Shahid

Iowa State University

Fall 2020

EE 494 General Education Reflection

During my time here at Iowa State I have taken many general education courses. Most of them
have helped me understand the concepts of engineering in better ways simply because
engineering is used in almost all aspects of life. The content that I learned in some of my
general education courses have either enhanced or complemented my learnings in engineering
courses.

One such class that has helped me understand engineering better is Environmental Science
324. In that class, we find the ways energy is being used in the world. It talks about the use of
fossil fuels like Gas, Oil and Coal in the world to make energy for consumption. The class also
tells us about the ways that technological innovation is changing the world’s view of these fossil
fuels and how the use of science and engineering is helping industries find alternate ways of
making energy. This class has helped me a lot since I got ideas and ways to figure out my senior
design project. We are making a self-harvesting power scrapping module and our input voltage
is supposed to be from a self-sustaining energy input so that has to be either a small wind mill
kind of a technology like a photodiode that takes light as a source of an input and helps us make
electricity to act as a our source of input. If I had not taken this course, I wouldn’t have been
able to find out the kind of technology that might help us finish our project.

Another course that I have taken that has helped in engineering concepts is Econ 101. This
course goes over the basics of economics and tells us about the ways microeconomics works.
As in the relation between buyers and sellers. It also introduces concepts like worth analysis
and annual worth analysis. These topics are used in IE 305 a lot. A course that refers to the
economics in engineering and makes use of engineering knowledge to find and make products
cheaper and help decide what is the worth of a product. If I had not taken this course I wouldn’t
have been able to help solve questions that asks to help buyers decide what product or
investment would help them In the future and what choice would help money works for the
user.

The third course that had helped me relate engineering concepts to real life scenarios was
Theatre 101. In theatre one big problem that arises is that lights sometimes fail to focus on the
main star of the performance because for some reason it can’t keep up with the speed of the
performer if he moves to swiftly or fast. While, there are solutions to this problem, not all
theatres can afford such a high cost of the equipment. I feel like using various cost saving
engineering techniques to make lights and parts easier to manufacture would help offset the
high cost of such systems.

These courses are small examples of how general education courses help in understanding
engineering knowledge better and I feel like the courses that I took at Iowa State helped in
understanding and implementing the concepts learned to solve engineering problems.