General Education Requirements Reflection

Throughout my time at Iowa State University, I was required to take multiple non-
engineering related courses. These courses were meant to build skills outside of the core
engineering classes that would still be useful to me as an engineer. I think the biggest gain from
these courses is how to address and communicate with people with different perspectives. When
it comes to producing a product, you never know how a person will interpret your work.
Especially in power systems where a lot of our deliverables are schematics, wiring diagrams and
layouts. My gen-eds also provided me with an opportunity to expand my knowledge about
different economic and global impacts that engineering solutions can have especially on the
environment. This provided me with a better understanding of different ethical dilemmas faced
in our engineering projects as we need to evaluate our solutions to ensure that we are not
harming people by negatively impacting their environment.
Through my creative writing class, I developed a valuable skill in revising my document
so that it can be interpreted by a large audience. During English Creative Writing Fiction class, I
had to develop short stories and review my classmate’s work. Through this project I worked on
skills that will be useful as an engineer such as thinking outside the box about solutions. One
thing that is common about problem solving is that the answer is not always straight forward.
This class helped me develop critical thinking skills that allow me to identify solutions to
problems in a way that would keep my audience engaged in the story. I needed to make sure that
the logic my characters used was easily followed by the audience. By doing this I was able to
practice problem solving skills in a unique and challenging way. Along with this I also got to
experience how important it is to have an audience review your work. During this class we had
workshops to review our peers’ works. Through these workshops we summarized what happened
in the stories. These summaries often exposed errors in our work where the audience
misinterpreted our work. Through this it became clear that when you develop a design document
you should always have someone review it and discribe to you what the document is about. This
way if you have any errors in the document, it will become clear to the engineer. I have used this
method in multiple instances to help me revies engineering documents at my internships.
Along with improving my communication skills I also learned to think about ethics in my
engineering solutions my World Food Issues course I gained lots of knowledge about how people
who do not pay attention to ethics can negatively impact their workers and peoples lives. Several
examples included how poor countries which produced a lot of food would often still face food
insecurity because they paid the workers so little. Today famine in countries is always because of
poor political decisions and mismanagement of resources. These are great examples of how an
engineer should make sure they consider all the potential impacts of the product they are
producing. There is also a need to support communities in these countries, so this class has
influenced me to want to find ways to waste less food and make sure that when I purchase food, I
know that the people producing it are being properly compensated.
Another gen-ed I have taken is my energy and the environment class. This is a super
important topic for me as I am very passionate about protecting the environment. I think this
class has been important as it provided me with more information about what the impacts of
energy production are. Especially the issues created by mining for coal. This class surprised me
by showing that there are certain practices for obtaining fossil fuels that are much worse than
others. For example, we explored how mountain top removal and valley fill is far worse than
open pit mining. This could be useful as an engineer who will be helping design this new energy
infrastructure to ensure that the materials are procured from mines that minimize their
environmental impact. I also think this information will be useful to persuade investors and my
superiors at work to go with cleaner options for the types of energy production. For example,
producing more wind and solar. This would go hand in hand with what I learned from my
personal finance gen ed. This class taught me about how to make a budget and plan for
unexpected expenses. This is important as in construction you need to set aside money to make
sure you are prepared to clean up the environment for unexpected disasters. For example, if I am
involved in the construction of an oil generator system and there is an oil leak, we need to keep
money aside for soil remediation (I was involved in a project where this happened).
Overall, my general education requirements were useful and in some instances fun for me
as I got to learn about topics outside of my normal technical course work. I know that this
information will be important for me in my engineering career because I will be more prepared
for potential disasters as I will have a plan and budget in place should something go wrong. I will
also ensure to put in place specifications to prioritize minimizing the environmental impacts of
the project. Not only to protect biodiversity, but also to protect the lively hood of people living in
the vicinity of the electrical infrastructure. I have also learned a valuable lesson about ensuring
that my design documents are well reviewed before passing them on to a contractor for
construction.