EE 494

Jianyi Li

General Education Reflection

03/14/19

General Education Reflection

In my career at Iowa State University, in order to be fully developed, as an electrical engineering

student, we need to learn other professional knowledge. Next, I will list the General Education

courses I have studied and tell me what I have learned.

When I was freshman, I took Econ 101 for my first General Education class. It is a hard class for

me, one reason is I am an international student, so professional words I may not understand

correctly, in this case, I lost many points from this. Although I didn’t learn it well, I still learned

a lot from this course. It is about Micro Economic Course. What I can tell is Microeconomics is a

course which we could learn the economic theory that studies the economic behavior of

individual economic units in the society. After I learned from this course, I can easily understand

the theory which is used in our life. As far as I learned from this course, I think it is a good class

to let us have a good understanding of the topics in the Econ 101, includes equilibrium price

theory, consumer behavior theory, producer behavior theory, production theory and cost theory

and so on.

The second one is Theatre 110, it is one my favorite General Education class in Iowa State

University. The interesting thing when I was taking this class is that I could have changes to

attend two ISU theatre productions to accept the influence of drama. In the class, the professor

also usually provides us some information about theatre. Although we need to remember some
knowledge that she provided online for the class quiz, it is the most fun class I have taken during

the four college years.

AMD 165 is another General Education I took, and I think it is also fun to experience some other

culture’s dressing style, also it will talk about the trends of dressing. In this class, we have a

small survey for us to do, we need to write the color of bags when we choose a location, and

write down the numbers of each color, then we could know the most popular color. And also,

there is a kind of experience of the dressing class after the lecture, I attended it and tried the

female dress which is from past, so that I could free the freeing when I dress it. What is more, in

the class, each team has around 5-6 members, so we could communicate about the trend of dress

when we have free time to talk, usually the communicate is effective, we can know each member

what they consider what is fashion, and what is the trend in their mind.

After I took three 100 level General Education courses, I need to take over 300 levels, the first

one I took is Econ 355, it is about world economy, we will learn some knowledge about

international trade, closed economy, open economy and so on. The professor usually provides

useful examples for us to easily understand what is he talking about in this lecture, and he also

provided pictures of diagrams in his course websites for us to learn.

Another 300 level General Education is HIST 337, it is about history of modern China from

1912 to present. Although I am Chinese student and I know some history about that time, I still

learned a lot after I took that course by helping from professor. That time is a dark time for China

to search for a new order and continuing Chinese revolution. During the time we were learning

the knowledge of the history of modern China, we also need to write essay about the topic that

professor was done and reflect what we understand about the event, which is happened in China
that time. After I took the course, I have more clear understand about the history of modern

China.

In the end, all General Education courses I took are interesting, they can help me to learn

knowledge from another major and enrich my experience.