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General Education in Sustainability & Economics

The document reflects on general education courses taken at Iowa State University. The author found economics and sustainability courses most useful as they were tangential to their engineering major. A economics course taught about weighing costs and benefits to maximize performance. Sustainability courses addressed issues like limited resources for green technologies. These courses broadened the author's scope while providing lessons applicable to their career in engineering around balancing costs, accessibility, and sustainability.

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33 views2 pages

General Education in Sustainability & Economics

The document reflects on general education courses taken at Iowa State University. The author found economics and sustainability courses most useful as they were tangential to their engineering major. A economics course taught about weighing costs and benefits to maximize performance. Sustainability courses addressed issues like limited resources for green technologies. These courses broadened the author's scope while providing lessons applicable to their career in engineering around balancing costs, accessibility, and sustainability.

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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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General Education Reflection

Over the course of my time at Iowa State, I have been required to take many general

education credits of my choosing. For me, I found that the ones I deemed important to take

were related to sustainability and economics. This is because I felt they were tangential to

my major, where they were a topic that would not be brought up in my main classes, but

that could be applied to some of the work I will do in my career.

For the economic side of my general education credits, I completed Econ 101.

While this class mostly covered the basics of supply and demand, it also taught us about

how to weigh whether spending additional money would be worth it based on the

additional good we could get out. As an engineer, it can be very easy to go through a project

trying to design something that has the best possible performance you can get out of it.

However, often, we need to find ways to maximize our performance vs our costs and

ensure that we are not wasting time and resources that could be better spent elsewhere.

Additionally, we also must consider how the costs behind our project affect the

consumers, as we cannot sell products for so high that they become inaccessible, or so

low that we cannot produce a reliable project.

Additionally, I also took sustainability courses such as ANTHR 220, Globalization

and Sustainability. I took this class because it offered to teach us about how to understand

key issues in the world that surround building sustainable technology as it relates to

economics, materials, and energy. This class taught me well many of the key ideas relating

to everything that needs to be considered if we are to continue down the path of


implementing more green technologies. It is something that is not easily done, especially

considering that many of the green technologies require materials that are in very limited

supply, and this can in turn negatively affect the economics surrounding them. As

engineers, it is our duty to consider how to make our products as green as possible.

After having taken multiple general education courses, I have found that the ones

that were most useful to me were the ones that not only broadened my scope, but that

could still be applied to my life and my career as an engineer. Of these, the ones I found

helpful were the ones that talked about economics and sustainability. These have taught

me how to balance the monetary side of what I do and how to choose sustainable and

good options for the environment compared to other options.

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