General Education Reflection

Although general education courses can sometimes seem like a burden having to take a
class that isn’t in your core curriculum, I believe they should be viewed as a valuable and
mindset broadening experience. They are our opportunity as computer engineers to finally
branch out and broaden our horizons in so many ways. We are conditioned from all our
engineering homework, tests, and labs to look at problems in a very particular and technical way.
These general education classes can help to give us different viewpoints and differing methods to
solving problems than our usual means. It is also a fantastic opportunity to meet other students
from different majors and get that diversification that we wouldn’t be able to obtain just from our
core computer engineering classes.
I have been lucky enough to be able to use my general education classes as a pathway to
obtain a minor in leadership studies here at Iowa State. As I mentioned above, this has been a
very enlightening experience, and one that I wouldn’t trade for the world. One class that I took
for my leadership studies minor was Speech Communications 312: Business and Professional
Speaking. This was obviously an amazing class for the purpose of expanding and developing my
public speaking skills. This was a great opportunity to practice and perfect my speech writing
and delivery. I also believe that this class gave me an excellent chance to work with a very
diverse group of students for the group projects. This experience is something that I will take
with me throughout my career as an engineer undoubtedly. It gave me valuable training in
working with diverse groups of people for the future, where I may need to communicate my
ideas or thoughts to people from a different culture or with a different background of skills. I will
also have this diversification of problem-solving skills, which will help me to solve future
problems as an engineer.
Another amazing class for developing my non-technical skills was Management 370:
Management of Organizations. This once again was a great opportunity for working in diverse
groups, as I worked with almost exclusively business and management majors. It helped me to
understand the ways that other people look at problems, other than the most technical way that I
and most engineers do. This class also helped me specifically to understand not just how leaders
worked in an organization, but how their constituents can make just as valuable of a contribution.
All this experience with groups of differing personalities and backgrounds will ultimately
make me the most well-rounded and best engineer that I can be. I will be able to have the
experience understanding how others view issues and working with diverse groups to help make
my future problem-solving experiences exponentially smoother and easier. I also will have
gained valuable volunteering and speaking experiences. This will help the current issue of some
engineers not having the best communication skills for when they are needed. Whether they need
to communicate to other non-engineers, or within their team, I will help to fix the social issue of
engineers not being to communicate efficiently. With all my studying about leaders and groups
in management, I will also be able to transition to a management role easier later in my career
and use my platform to help solve issues that are important to me. It will also provide me with a
better opportunity to contribute more earlier on in my career, with my knowledge of group
dynamics.
 I believe that students can drastically change their futures and career paths with their use
of their general education classes at Iowa State. You can gain valuable and lifelong skills from
these opportunities. These classes shouldn’t be seen as a requirement, but as an opportunity,
because that is what they were for me. It was an amazing chance for me to broaden my
engineering skills and make my self a more well-rounded engineer. I have zero regrets about
taking general education classes other than that I couldn’t take more.