Liam Tureaud

EE 494

General Education Reflection

October 2022

As I reminisce about the prior four years of schooling and think about all the various

types of classes I have taken other than the core required ones needed for graduation, I can’t help

but to remember the first class I went to and what the professor said. It was EE 185, the

introductory class for electrical engineering taught by Professor Mani Mina. I remember the first

thing he did was put on a video of Luciano Pavarotti, a famous opera singer, and he then

preceded to talk about mastery of subjects and skills.

That was then a segway into him talking about how the work in engineering can be quite

dehumanizing and demanding of oneself and that the other general education classes such as arts

and humanities can revitalize, rehumanize, and give us a break from the grueling engineering

classes. This then sparked an interest in me go pursue my interest in learning about music and

various functions of the world.

Throughout my life, I have always been a big history buff. Back in high school I took a

few dual credit classes offered through a local community college. One class I took was History

of Rock and Roll. Ever since I was young, I was always into rock and roll. This class gave me

the history of Rock and how it came to be and touched a few of the numerous artists and their

legendary songs. The reason history has always appealed to me because it gives one insight as to

how things were and how things came to be. This gives me a real understanding and appreciation

for everything around me.

 Once I came to college, I then ended up signing up for a Spanish class, Span 102. I really

enjoyed diving deeper into my previous Spanish knowledge and learning more about the

language. Although it wasn’t anything too demanding or in depth, it still helped me get a

baseline and the start to an understanding of the Spanish language.

After a year or so I met with my advisor and found a class to fill my international

perspective requirement. I ended up taking Aging and the Family, HDFS 377. This class taught

me all the ins and outs about family life and how we age. I went into this class quite nonchalantly

and quite indifferent to what the class would be about but as the lectures kept going, I was

learning about divorce, diversity, death and how we deal with it, marriage, how we age,

intergenerational relationships, retirement and financial resources, and the list goes on and on. I

found this class so engaging and interesting. There were so many statistics on these subjects, and

I found all of it so fascinating. It really opened my eyes and gave me another perspective and

break compared to engineering.

Then finally to wrap up the gist of my general education classes, I ended up taking Russia

Today, RUS 375. This class combined my love for culture and history. This class was about the

history of the USSR and all that happened during that era. Although it was a history class, this

class also gave us an insight into Russian culture at that time. In this class we watched films from

that era and documentaries about average people and their daily lives in the Soviet Union. This

class really opened my eyes to other happening around the world!

During my time in college, I really took advantage of pursuing my passion and love of

history while expanding my horizons to learn about different cultures. I am very thankful and

appreciative of my general education professors and their effort to show me all the ins and outs
of arts and humanities. I am very thankful I took a shot in the dark on one class and ended up

really enjoying the content! I am glad I was exposed to all of these interesting subjects!