<p>USAFA class of '79 had LCWB inscribed on their rings. The people running the place didn’t know what the acronym meant till it was too late.</p>
<p>So, here’s what’s amusing in reading all of this. I have a liberal arts education – I attended a women’s LAC, studied a range of things, including calculus. My SO is a graphics engineer, none of that fancy LAC stuff. He’s actually mostly self-taught. He’s well-respected in his field, and makes a mess more money than I do. </p>
<p>On the other hand, now that we’re in our 40’s, he frequently feels left out of conversations about all sorts of things. He didn’t study literature, has no grounding in history or political science or philosophy. He is a wonderful person, but he feels a serious lack in his life, that although he is great at his work, he is missing some of the educational background to participate culture as fully as the rest of our household does. We have to explain literary and cultural allusions to him. A lot. </p>
<p>I make less money, but my LAC education makes me more intellectually nimble. I have a wide base of knowledge and thinking skills that means I have moved from job to job quickly when I needed to. I’m well known among friends for the breadth of knowledge I have. And, like I said, I’m the one explaining the references to my SO. </p>
<p>Being able to make money is nice, but I don’t regret my education, because it has enriched my daily life in ways I can’t even begin to catalogue. It’s allowed me to be a great parent, too, because I can always challenge my children intellectually. (My son once told me that he hoped that after going to college, he would one day know “more things” than I do. 
) It’s always amused my children that whatever their homework, whatever obscure topic they were studying, I could help them with it. </p>
<p>On the other hand, my SO? He almost daily wishes he had some of my LAC-ness. Work and making money isn’t everything, and there’s an extent to which he always feels like he’s an outsider because he doesn’t have a stronger educational background. I don’t regret not being an engineer, but he frequently wishes he had the benefits of a liberal arts education.</p>
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<p>I don’t think being an engineer necessarily is mutually exclusive of having a well-rounded liberal arts-style education. I think it just means that you have to make it a priority to be well-rounded, which I unfortunately don’t think a lot of engineers end up doing, because the number of credit hours required in our majors is so ridiculously high. (I think we need to do a better job of that, in our engineering curricula, but I’m not sure how we’d be able to mandate that…)</p>
<p>I’m lucky, in that I went to an amazing secondary school that required my fluency in another language and required me to be have a ridiculous vocabulary and to be well-versed in history and literature. I’m very fortunate in that. My husband is a composer, just about to finish up his doctorate in music composition, and he’s got a minor in physics and math… I don’t think that either one of us regrets our career choices (though we’re still young, and there’s admittedly still time…) and both of us have the advantage of being pretty well-rounded… He’s better at history, sports, and music than I am, but I’m better at geography, literature, and science than he is.</p>
<p>Also, we’re awesome at Trivial Pursuit. ;)</p>
<p>I think it’s just important to be well-rounded, in general. I like my engineer’s way of looking at things, because it’s turned out to be pretty useful (particularly in light of the fact that I’m employed as an engineer…) but I also really appreciate the need for a wider range of knowledge.</p>
<p>aibarr,</p>
<p>Your post, #170, is the best I have read on CC. It sure puts a smile on my face.</p>
<p>It also dovetail with what I was saying earlier on this thread: in order to do well on a discipline such as math or acquire a high level of fluency in a language like Mandarin, one has to put in enormous amount of time, something most people are not prepared to do.</p>
<p>I can, for example, wait until a week before a history exam before “cracking the books”. As long as I can memorize enough dates and names I can write a good exam because most of my classmates were not willing to do even that much. (Of course, chances are I will forget what I have memorized in a couple of weeks time, but that is another matter). For my next history course, I can do the same with a different set of dates and names. Because the knowledge is not cumulative, I do not have to relearn everything or in many cases anything from my previous history course in order to do well.</p>
<p>If I were to try that method with math or Chinese, I would have been dead in the water a long time ago. What I had to do was to stay up-to-date, assimilate new material as they are presented, and practice, practice, practice. That is why students drop them like hot potatoes. I know because I have been on both sides of the fence.</p>
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While this may work in an introductory survey course in History or any weak course taught by a weak prof in ANY discipline (physics, bio, included but gosh not foreign language), it would not work on most upper level History courses . They are NOT regurgitation based and require insight, cumulative knowledge, deductive and inductive abilities, and a strong background in the material . Memorization, while being an admirable skill, is nothing but a parlor trick in the world of serious historical inquiry. Critical thinking and the ability to communicate that thinking is paramount.</p>
<p>“Cramming only” as an option becomes less viable as you progress in any study in any discipline. History is not unique.</p>
<p>The comments by the poster above did bring me a chuckle as I remembered a particular research oriented History course in UG that required as it’s minimum reading 10,000 pages of source material. If someone could cram and memorize the “dates and names” (paraphrase) and still pass the test in that class, I’d be afraid to meet them. 
Edit: And I am the guy who could cram with the best of them but this “test” was basically “I’m going to pick a nit out of this library of material and you are going to connect it to everything we learned this semester in a freehand, no computer helpers, pencil on paper research quality document and you have 2.5 hours to do it. Enjoy.” I think I wrote 38 pages. It was great prep for the one question tests in Law School. ;)</p>
<p>“While this may work in an introductory survey course in History or any weak course taught by a weak prof in ANY discipline (physics, bio, included but gosh not foreign language), it would not work on most upper level History courses .” </p>
<p>No, I don’t fully agree. While a weak student do better in history taught by a weak prof in a weak course, a weak student will die faster in math, physics, Chinese, and the like if he/she is taught by a weak prof. THAT is my point.</p>
<p>While I appreciate quality work in any discipline, I have not come across work in humanities that left me stumped except later Wittgenstein. I don’t have the same success with science, however. Even the math in the Journal of Finance is well beyond me, and I am not even talking about theoretical physics and the like.</p>
<p>I find the GRE and GMAT scores (of students from different disciplines) consistent with my experience and observation. (I remember seeing a similar rank ordering in an old study on IQ and college prof of various disciplines.)</p>
<p>If somebody can show me evidence to the contrary, I would be happy to entertain it. After all, I am a humanities/social science grad.</p>
<p>TrinSF, I sense a little lack of critical thinking in your post, something which LAC proponents like to trumpet(he says with an impish grin).</p>
<p>But seriously, most of what we learn and almost of all we converse about is far removed from what we learned in the classroom. The best education is one which prompts you to a life of learning by reading, being active in civic life, participation in the arts(if only as spectator) and athetics(not the couch potato sort), persuing a spititual journey(or not and analyzing why), etc. It is more the intellectually curious nature of the individual rather than the sort of college education received. And I am certain we can all identify any number of people in our lives who were extraordinarily interesting and did not ever enter into a college classroom. </p>
<p>I’m just an engineer but do all of the above and enjoy all the things I noted above in the development of an interesting person. I mean why did I watch a tv show last nite about Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War rather than the Rockets-Mavs game? And how did I know about the pseudo-archaeology of Hienrich Schliemann? And let me tell you a little something about sprechstimme. Pierrot Lunaire is good but I like Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte a lot better.</p>
<p>"Yes --one–the first–the last–the best–
The Cincinnatus of the West,
Whom envy dared not hate,
Bequeath’d the name of Washington,
To make man blush there was but one!</p>
<p>It reads well but sprechstimmed it makes the hairs on the neck stand on end.</p>
<p>But hey, I’m only and engineer.</p>
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<p>You’re only <em>an</em> engineer, but who’s counting anyway? ;)</p>
<p>At any rate, unfortunately, you and I and engineers like us are few and far between. As a grad student at Illinois, I was the only one in the department even aware that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra actually makes an annual trek down to Champaign to put on a concert, and when I discovered, flabbergasted, that nobody had bothered to attend (tickets were only $30 for students!! For the CSO!!), nobody even really realized that they’d missed anything.</p>
<p>They played Prokofiev’s Fifth, too… Such an amazing piece.</p>
<p>Most grad student parties involved standing in a professor’s backyard in a circle, everyone palming a beer, while another professor talked about research. I had a friend from undergrad who went to the same grad program as I did, but took a year off to do a Watson fellowship. He travelled in the footsteps of Vasco de Gama and wrote on cultural changes observed, in perspective of what had happened historically… He and I would stand around and talk about non-engineering things at these backyard events. Politics, art, music, literature, culture, food, wine, etc… People would join us when things started looking interesting, but they’d quickly be sucked back into the larger circle, where it was all engineering, all the time. Sometimes our conversation would turn to how sad that was.</p>
<p>So, we’re unfortunately in the minority. Not sure what to do about it, other than to continue being interested in everything.</p>
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<p>I concur…</p>
<p>TrinSF, anecdotes are irrelevant. Every point you bring up can be refuted by simply looking at the data.</p>
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Aibarr, I know lots of engineers & not one of them talks about engineering away from work. Not even at work related social gatherings. I can’t think of a group more well rounded & interesting & fun. The parties of which you speak sound like hell, and my engineer H would have hit the road in a hurry & found a real party!</p>
<p>I don’t know about engineers so much, but I can tell you that among medical doctors you can distinguish those who had a liberal arts education by how much time they spend on shop talk vs. general topics in a social setting.</p>