Approximately how many electives do you feel were valuable to your education?

[guyver01]

My Bowling Elective was quite valuable to my education.

 

[gophins72]

Would it be possible to make the humanities courses a bit more relevant though?

Absolutely, and it sounds like the choices are too limited, especially if you had to take specifically, an American Jazz History and Theater class rather than other literature, current events or other music class.

From your description of the economics class, perhaps there's a problem with requirements that prevent taking more advanced classes. I would personally have loved to have taken a calc-based economics class after I finished my calc. classes. Especially one where the topic was the stock market and/or options. And I would have loved to have taken it to fulfill any economics requisite to a degree.

World history sounds like it refined your viewpoint, if not also bolstering it.

 

[Jeff7]

Absolutely, and it sounds like the choices are too limited, especially if you had to take specifically, an American Jazz History and Theater class rather than other literature, current events or other music class.

"Had to take" isn't quite the right term for it...they were pretty much selected because they seemed like 1) "The lesser of [multiple] evils" option, 2) They happened to be offered when I had credit slots available in a semester.
It wasn't a huge campus though (my choice, I'm no fan of vast groups of people), so they couldn't really have a variety of specialized courses on stuff like The Mating Habits of Spongebobs, or Fine Art with Dirt Clods.

From your description of the economics class, perhaps there's a problem with requirements that prevent taking more advanced classes. I would personally have loved to have taken a calc-based economics class after I finished my calc. classes. Especially one where the topic was the stock market and/or options. And I would have loved to have taken it to fulfill any economics requisite to a degree.
...

Well the Econ course was meant as an intro course for non-econ/business majors, but it was still useful, while still being terribly basic. Still, it's the kind of material that seems fairly important to know in a pseudo-capitalist, free-ish-market society. But I guess that's just like, my opinion, maaaaan.
(But really, some people were having a lot of trouble with following a supply/demand graph. Two straight lines, two axes, one point of intersection, and a lot of people had trouble with it. Cripes, some of the graphs in my engineering courses had multiple labeled curvy lines, axes labeled on all 4 sides, and one or two logarithmic axes. Those were fun to follow.
On the plus side, Econ was really good in terms of GPA points vs time spent. )

 

[Imp]

Most of them were useful, but I took engineering so I only got to take 2 per year. Archaeology/Anthropolgy and Sociology were probably the best.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Science and engineering should take more humanities and liberal arts classes so that students can make better and more informed decisions outside of solving logic puzzles. This applies to pretty much everything, ranging from career and life decisions such as which job to take to when to move out of the parent's house to which candidate to vote for.

More specific examples, plz. If someone is a science or engineering major they probably have a decent idea on what career they are planning on going into, and I don't see how you can educate someone on which candidate to vote for. From my social work elective I guess I could have learned to vote for whatever political candidate supports the homeless. :hmm:

 

[IndyColtsFan]

I am trying to remember what my requirements were. I think it was 18 hours of social sciences/liberal arts, and IIRC, I took 3 Spanish classes and 3 Econ courses. I enjoyed the Econ courses but to be completely honest, I only selected the Spanish classes because I knew they would be easy As requiring little effort and work. I was right. I aced Spanish in high school and knew it would be little challenge in college. After the first test in one of the courses, the instructor announced "If you aced Spanish in high school, this class probably isn't for you and you should go drop it and sign up for a more advanced one." I thought to myself "Yeah, right!"

The most worthless class I took was actually a grad-level CS course about object-oriented methodologies. The professor was extremely bad and the book was even worse.

EDIT: Major was electrical engineering and I went to grad school for EE as well, but took a break and haven't finished yet.

 

[DaveSimmons]

My BS is in Computer Science.

I chose my electives in subjects that interested me, like formal logic, operations research, non-Western music, English literature, art and literature of the Renaissance.

The only elective course that seemed like a waste was an Intro to Microeconomics, which was too low-level to be interesting. But at least it was an easy A.

 

[gophins72]

More specific examples, plz. If someone is a science or engineering major they probably have a decent idea on what career they are planning on going into, and I don't see how you can educate someone on which candidate to vote for. From my social work elective I guess I could have learned to vote for whatever political candidate supports the homeless. :hmm:

You don't educate them on who to vote for, you give them an education on how to make their own decisions. You do see examples of history repeating itself from history classes, especially in regard to countries making rash decisions based on economics or pride (WWI -> WWII). For me, it was a class called "total war in europe". It may be a different class for you depending on your viewpoints, professor, syllabus and school. For most people, especially on forums, logic classes and hopefully avoidance in strawman tactics would be most beneficial. And you hope that people take the high road and try to find solutions rather than just try to win an argument/point. Or worse, vote in favor of short term economic benefit for themselves rather than a long term win for the country. Of course, this might be a futile endeavor. But you want them to be critical thinkers rather than fodder for a good one-liner politician or superficial news anchor. These skills can be used for not only who to vote for but in making life decisions.

 

[LumbergTech]

most of my classes are useful, but not necessarily just for doing my specific career job although they still may apply to my career overall

 

[DaveSimmons]

You don't educate them on who to vote for, you give them an education on how to make their own decisions. You do see examples of history repeating itself from history classes, especially in regard to countries making rash decisions based on economics or pride (WWI -> WWII). For me, it was a class called "total war in europe". It may be a different class for you depending on your viewpoints, professor, syllabus and school. For most people, especially on forums, logic classes and hopefully avoidance in strawman tactics would be most beneficial. And you hope that people take the high road and try to find solutions rather than just try to win an argument/point. Or worse, vote in favor of short term economic benefit for themselves rather than a long term win for the country. Of course, this might be a futile endeavor. But you want them to be critical thinkers rather than fodder for a good one-liner politician or superficial news anchor. These skills can be used for not only who to vote for but in making life decisions.

Yes, every student should be forced to take an "informal logic" / critical thinking class as part of their electives to be able to see through all of the intentional fallacies in political debates.

We might see a better class of politician elected if the audience shouted out "straw man! ad hominem! false dilemma! . . . bingo!" during the debates

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Philosophy is actually one that I could see being very useful, especially in symbolic logic, inductive reasoning, and such. Survey-style "Philosophies of Religion X or Culture Y" don't seem so as much. Guess which of the two my college doesn't accept as a valid elective. :whiste:

 

[gophins72]

In retrospect, I wish I had taken more courses on religion and/or mythology (not to say one is the other)...there are a lot of interesting religions out there and it's cool hearing some old old old school stories of creation.

 

[Bibble]

In retrospect, I wish I had taken more courses on religion and/or mythology (not to say one is the other)...there are a lot of interesting religions out there and it's cool hearing some old old old school stories of creation.

My uncle, a political science professor and one time political science student like myself, expressed similar sentiments to me before my senior year of college. Sometime later I signed up for a course called Islamic Mysticism which basically focused on Sufism. Not only was the material entertaining, but I learned a ton because I knew absolutely nothing about that topic prior. While the knowledge I gained isn't super useful, it certainly broadened my horizons and therefore consider it valuable.