General Education Reflection

Throughout my career at Iowa State, I have had the opportunity to learn and participate
in many technically challenging classes. Unfortunately, these classes do not give an outlook on
how the rest of the world is setup outside of the workplace. I was fortunate enough to be able
to take 2 different econ classes throughout my time at Iowa State. Econ has always been a
difficult subject to for me to understand because the language style is different from what I am
used to. This was able to give me a different perspective on different problems.
Engineering can sometimes make problems overly complicated and hard to understand. Econ
often does the opposite. It knows what information is needed to make the necessary
observations without over complicating the problem. In engineering, I have often times found
myself taking the same approach to break down a problem. I start out by making a few mental
simplifications to gain an understanding of the problem. Afterwards, I can start to remove the
simplifications to get back to the original problem. This thought process has helped me a lot
when I am trying to understand complex problems.
These 2 econ classes have also given me a different perspective on how things are setup in
different types of departments in the workplace. When I was on my coop during the spring of
my junior year, I worked on the same floor as the marketing department. During this time
naming conventions between departments often varied significantly. Having taken an econ
class ahead of time and then one afterwards gave me a greater application and understanding
for these differences. For example, engineers often focus on names that are more helpful for
an understanding of the differences between products and marketing has a larger focus on
what is going to make the product more marketable. Taking a combination of both engineering
classes and general education class was able to give me a better perspective on how the world
is setup and different ways to solve problems.