Ryan Ingram

General Electives Reflection

In my time at Iowa State I have had the opportunity to take a variety of general

education courses. I have been able to learn about political science, geology, environmental

science, and anthropology. These courses were nice to take because they gave me a break from

all the technical courses and let me think in a different way. I also got to spend time learning

stuff that I am interested in outside of engineering.

One class I really enjoyed was geology. I have always been interested in this type of

science and I am happy I was able to take that course. This class was especially interesting

because of how it relates to the real world. We got to learn about everything from the

atmosphere to the earth core and it showed me ways of thinking that I didn’t see before.

Another class that was interesting was my political science course. What made this class

so interesting is that I took it when I was in Madrid, Spain. Because of this I learned it with so

many different perspectives with there being a bunch of students from all around the world.

Part of the class was to conduct or own political experiment and show all the results from a

simulated real-world example. I enjoyed listening to the other students experiments because it

was about a bunch of different topics.

Overall, general education has been a great way to learn in different ways and gain new

experiences at Iowa State.