Ethan Shoemaker

Cpr E 494

General Education Reflection

General education is an interesting idea and fits oddly for the curriculum of all

engineering majors. Since computer engineers take so many problem solving courses

and are only required to take 5 gen ed courses, it can be restricting which gen ed

courses you can take. Unless one carefully chooses all of their gen ed courses early in

their college career, they will end up taking courses that have few (if any) prerequisites

since they likely will not meet any prerequisites and so they end up taking classes in

many different departments.

However, this does provide some interesting benefits to these students; since

these courses have no prerequisites, they tend to cover a wider variety of topics within a

single course. This is very fortunate as one of the purposes of gen eds for engineers is

to provide the student with a broader education that covers more than problem solving.

The gen ed portion of my education has provided me with a way to more easily connect

the requirements that an end user or consumer has to concrete deliverables that an

engineer can produce.

This skill of being able to listen to someone and what their needs and restrictions

are and generate a solution is incredibly valuable and marketable to employers. These

gen ed courses provided me with opportunities to hone my communication skills and

collaborate in a team of diverse individuals. Almost all of my gen ed courses have

included a team based project or team based portion of the class.

 Part of approaching an engineering problem is first taking a moment to clarify

details and requirements that your client has. It is easy for a professor to simply tell us

this, but I was able to use the gen ed classes as chances to practice and receive

feedback on my leadership skills, initiative, and work delegation which allow me to do

just that.

One class in which I was able to do this was my Conflict Management class

(Comst 218). The title of this class explains most of what it covered, but it also showed

how approaching situations with a more open mindset and not jumping to

conclusions/solutions generally results in happier participants. One of the more

interesting portions of this class was the current events portion. Each week, we would

have to read a section and also find a current global event which we would discuss

informally. This exposed how different people can view situations in subtly different

ways and how this subtlety can be misinterpreted as an opposing opinion. This is

analogous to two engineers interpreting a problem statement slightly differently and

having two ideas for solving it and stunting progress on the solution.

Another class which advanced my engineering knowledge outside of the

engineering courses was Organizational Behavior (Mgmt 371). This course was almost

entirely group activities. The consistent work that this class forced us to perform with the

same group each class period allowed us to develop stronger relationships and, in our

case, be more effective as a group. Since there were no prerequisites for this course, it

was very evident that each member had their own strengths. About a month into the

class, we had worked together enough that we found out what each of us were best at;
some were excellent note takers and others were better at presenting ideas to the

whole class. This can be similarly equated to the different tech areas within ECpE. For

example, I am more well versed in networking and security but I would want a group

member who has experience in UX design.