Joseph Nunez

SE 494: Gen Ed Descriptions

Gen Ed Courses Taken:

 History 201
 Architecture 321
 Economics 102
 Anthropology 201
 History 221
 Music 102

Although some of my general education courses were irrelevant to my developmental

progress as a professional Software Engineer, I feel that some classes had some significant
merit in terms of problem solving. The first being Music 102 due to the amount of stress the
professor put on the limitations of technology and resources that culminated in incredibly
diverse and complicated musical instruments. The second being Architecture 321 because of
the unique solutions to problems that we normally wouldn’t even think about or consider. For
instance, all buildings over a certain number of stories must contain an incline at the top to
allow light to pass onto the street during normal working hours, without this, the street would
constantly be in the shadow of the buildings until the sun is directly overhead.

1. What are your current short/long term goals? You may include your “ideal” career in
engineering or your preferred working environment.
a. Short Term – I’d like to graduate in the Fall of 2019 and have a full-time job to
transition into. Hopefully somewhere in the Midwest such as Chicago or Omaha.
b. Long Term – After three or so years at my company, I’d like to leverage my
experience to get a better offer elsewhere that I’d like to permanently settle. I
would also like a little more freedom such as flexible working hours and maybe
my own software team within my company.
c. In terms of an ideal career, I’d love to do engine work within a game
development company, however I wouldn’t mind staying in the financial sector.

2. What have you learned in your general education electives, which allow you to
formulate and evaluate engineering solutions in problem solving and innovation beyond
the technical aspects in problem solving? How do general education classes help you to
think about an engineering problem?
a. One of the most significant lessons I’ve learned regarding problem solving and
innovation beyond technical aspects is to always look to the future for possible
 complications and to the past for possible solutions. This was taught in
Architecture 321 regarding city building. When new cities were built, they were
built in such a way to add fluid growth to the outskirts of the city; which is why
most cities are built on a grid system. This can be applied to software in which
we as developers anticipate the potential growth of an application to account for
things such as stability, speed, and reliability.

3. Relate what you have learned in general education classes to seeing beyond the
engineering solution in problem solving and innovation. What are some other
dimensions to consider and what impact do they have in an economic, global or societal
context?
a. Like I mentioned above, some aspects to consider when working on software
development is how large you anticipate the userbase of an application to be,
how expensive is server space and what are typical connection speeds where the
application is intended to be deployed. All these concerns factor into an
economic context. Like this, one must consider if the content of their application
could be considered taboo; essentially, what’s normal in the US may not be
normal in China. This sort of societal issue can be easily demonstrated by looking
at what happened with Facebook in China; the idea was sound, but the content
wasn’t allowed.