Reflection on General Education Requirements

Caleb Arnold

General education requirements are invaluable to engineers in that they expose us to

perspectives other than our own. General education courses take a deeper dive into different
cultures, eras, and identities that the average student may have known nothing about in the
past. Engineers are responsible for designing and maintaining systems that often have an impact
on thousands, millions, or billions of people.

The courses I have taken helped me get one step closer to understanding the impact my
work could have on these thousands of other people. Any product or process must be designed
with multiple users in mind. Being able to learn about people in communities other than my
own makes it that much easier to design something with them in mind. It also opens a line of
critical thinking about other users that I may not be familiar with. If I’m conscious of some users
that my product may not work for, I’m more open to the idea that it could be improved for
other groups as well.

Outside of engineering, gaining perspective helps create a more welcoming and

educated environment for all. Western Civilization, a course I transferred in, was great to lay the
groundwork for religious, artistic, and overall cultural movements that helped shape part of the
world today. One course I took during my time at ISU was Religion in America, which focused on
religions ranging from those of the Native Americans to later religions introduced from
European or Asian immigrants. Gaining a basic understanding of these faiths will help me gain a
baseline understanding of people I interact with in or outside of the workplace and make it that
much easier to establish commonality.

Philosophy of Technology, a course I am currently taking, is helping me find ways to

question and evaluate the ways in which I interact with technology. Balance of privacy vs.
security, algorithmic bias, and ethics of artificial intelligence are just a few of the topics that this
course analyzes. As an engineer, it will be important to step back and look at my work through a
philosophical lens to ensure that I’m not doing more harm than good. As an individual, being
able to think critically about my use of technology will help keep me out of an addictive, almost
“autopilot” abuse of tech in my daily life.

The most impactful gen ed course I have taken is a sociology course known as Social
Class and Inequality. As a child, I went to school in an overwhelmingly white, upper middle-class
community. I didn’t have an opportunity there to interact with people of different
socioeconomic backgrounds to hear how their experiences differed from mine. This course took
a hard look at social stratification (primarily in America) to understand the systems that have
historically, and continue to, create layers of stratification in society. Having my eyes opened to
this reality made me re-evaluate where I fall in that system and how I can try to create more
opportunities for my peers and those who come after me.

Overall, these courses have helped me become more well-rounded both in my future
career and as a person. Technical knowledge is worthless if I don’t have the perspective to
understand how I can leverage this knowledge to improve the community around me. Being an
engineer means improving the world, and ignorance is incompatible with improvement.