EE 494

Andrew Jacobson

Spring 2021

General Education Reflection

Throughout my time at Iowa State University, I have taken many general education classes

mostly focus on economics. I chose to take economics classes as it is something I am interested

in because of my fathers work as a loan officer. Because of that, I wanted to have a better

understanding of economics.

The first general education class I took was Econ 101 in the fall of 2016. In this class I

learned about supply and demand and the effects that they have on the price of goods. Another

thing I learned about in that class is monopolies. Finally, I learned about was labor markets.

Econ 101 will work well with engineering as we learned about the market that the products I will

design will be in. This class will help me prepare to tackle issues when designing products such

as the price per good and understanding how supply effects the price of the good.

The next class I took was Econ 301 in the fall of 2018, this class is a continuation of Econ 101

including calculus and deeper exploration of the topics introduced in Econ 101. In this class we

explored the theory of consumer and business behavior, again relating it to the price of goods

and supply. I also learned about how calculus is used in economic analysis. Finally, I learned

about game theory. Like Econ 101, learning about these topics will help me understand the

overall market of the products I will be developing and how the market will react to them being

introduced.

For my final economics class, I took Econ 313 economics of sport in the spring of 2020. I

have always been a sports fan and wanted to know more about the inner workings of how sports
clubs are managed and economically profitable. In this class I learned about revenue sharing

between teams in a sports league. I also learned about sports betting and the economics of how

gambling is profitable. Finally, I learned about entering a competitive market. Overall, this class

served as good example of how economics is used in a real world setting and the topics covered

can be used similarly when applying it to research and design.

In the fall of 2020, I took Music 102. This class was used to cover my international

perspective requirement. In this class, I learned about different genres of music from around the

world and about the history of said genres and music. I also learned about what makes music a

form of art. Finally, I learned about what makes music so enjoyable, and how it relates to the

tone and timbre of music. Overall, I found this class to be enjoyable, but relating it to

engineering is hard. One for its relationship to engineering is understanding what makes music

an enjoyable product. When designing a new product, I will need to make sure it is enjoyable for

the user to use similar to music needing to be enjoyable for the listener to invest in the song.