Nathan Nordling
Cpre 494
10/18/19
General Education Reflection
Through my general education electives, I have learned a lot about empathizing with others and
thinking about other people. I have taken plenty of General education courses, but Economics of
Discrimination and Developmental Psychology stuck out to me. Each of these courses have helped in my
empathization of others, and I will reflect on them to remember about what I have learned and how it is
applicable to engineering.
In Developmental Psychology I mostly interacted with the material on my own since attendance
wasn’t required and it was early in the morning, but the material was very interesting to me, especially
some of the parts about the stages of life and how they could be successful or fail, and each failing
would create further issues down the line (go figure). There were some things in it that I didn’t really
expect like a large amount of information regarding the elderly and issues they face, which I wouldn’t
normally expect from a developmental course, but this one looked at the full extent of people’s lives.
Going back to Erik Erikson’s stages of life, it helps me to understand the types of issues different people
face in their lives, such as the generativity vs stagnation stage where a mid-aged person will either be
generating benefits for those who will come after them or stagnating and not caring about them.
Something like this is an issue I would normally not really think about, and it helps me to appreciate the
efforts of these people for giving back to youth. I think understanding others helps me in being able to
approach and talk with them. This empathy is useful for the paradigm of design thinking which is used to
create engineering solutions for problems, notably of course the empathy stage where you get to know
the client’s problems so that you can make the correct product for them. If you aren’t making the
product that a client needs, then you aren’t doing your job right.
In Economics of Discrimination I learned a lot about the economic issues faced by minorities and
how well different types of people perform economically, as well as in finding jobs. Something I did note
is that very often I used to disregard these types of issues because whenever they are brought up by
people who are trying to guilt trip you for political reasons, they will always be exaggerated heavily in a
way that can only convince people to not care instead since it seems too falsidical (amazing how that
works really). In reality, the issues of racial discrimination and aggregate average wage differences do
exist, albeit usually it is due to job preference in the case of male vs female, as well as how females will
usually be less stable in positions of work. There are still biases that exist with black and Hispanic
minorities for job searching which we discussed, although a rather funny idea was just how much better
Asians tended to do than other races including whites. A large amount of the problems were included in
the hiring of people and how subjective biases still exist even today among employers, and there isn’t
really an end-all solution since things like diversity quotas can only cause the same issues in reverse.
Hopefully one day we can hire people based off their qualifications alone. These sorts of difficult issues
can be applied to some engineering problems as well because there won’t always be a clear-cut solution
when you are trying to make money and create better products.
So, in conclusion, my general education courses have helped me to empathize with others which
is helpful for developing engineering solutions to problems. I have learned about issues I would not have
otherwise considered such as the problems of people much older than me, as well as minorities. There
are many difficult problems to tackle in the world, and by having a wider range of perspectives of issues
I hope that I will be able to create better solutions to the problems of people in the future, as well as
being able to get along better with the future people I will work with, and be able to understand their
issues.
