In a past life I was an engineer. While getting my undergraduate degree in electrical engineering in the late 1980s at Georgia Tech I enjoyed my liberal arts classes much more thoroughly than my engineering classes. I know, that should have told me something back then…I analyzed those years as a component of my memoir. Today, though, I’m thinking about the importance of receiving a well-rounded education given all sorts of calls for a narrower focus on STEM education. Here on the UW-Parkside campus, for example, the building floors are labeled D1 and D2, and L1 – L3. I recently learned that the “D” in the D1 and D2 designation stands for “down.” It seems that while L1 is considered to be the main level with a busy pedestrian walkway, D1 is “down one floor,” and D2 is “down two floors.” That made perfect sense to designers and engineers in the 1960s, but maybe if they had consulted others they would have realized that this system is cumbersome. (“If D2 is down two floors, is L2 up two floors? Up 2 floors from L1? Wait, that would make it L3??”) Or maybe they should have been required to take more liberal arts classes…