Bowen Zhang, March 2018

GENERAL EDUCATION REFLECTION

    It is great that we have a variety of general education courses, because it gives us chance to see something which are outside of our engineering world. However, I transferred some credits from my precious schools, so I only need to take two general education courses. The two course I took are International Trade and Finance (ECON 355) and Leadership Styles and Strategies in a Diverse Society (LD ST 322). 

​

    These two course are pretty helpful to me. From ECON 355, I learned International Monetary System, Macroeconomic Policies, Balance of Payments, Economic Integration, trade policies, and so on. These brought me the sense of world instead of only caring the country I live in. LD ST 322 is a really good class to improve my thought in leadership theories, which I never thought about before. The fish ball section gives me really good opportunities to talk my opinion about leadership and diversity in front of classmates. In the discussions session, I heard a lot of different ideas from other students, and it improved my group discussion skills, like how to deal with conflicts while discussion, what to do if the group is too silent. We also did a strength test in that class, and everyone in that class knows to focus on how to extends strengths instead of improve weakness. And the most important things, I made some friends who are from non-engineering majors. Although the course is a little bit difficult to get an A, but I really learned a lot from it.

    Because I am a transfer student, I did not have enough chances to take more general education courses, but I will strongly recommend my friends to take more general education courses.