{"id":430,"date":"2013-10-22T10:00:02","date_gmt":"2013-10-22T15:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/newdean\/?p=430"},"modified":"2013-10-22T10:00:02","modified_gmt":"2013-10-22T15:00:02","slug":"liberal-arts-for-engineers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/dean\/2013\/10\/22\/liberal-arts-for-engineers\/","title":{"rendered":"Liberal Arts for Engineers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8230;I analyzed those years as a component of my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Ghostbox-A-memoir-Walter-Jacobs\/dp\/0595451004\" target=\"_blank\">memoir<\/a>. Today, though, I&#8217;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 &#8211; L3. I recently learned that the &#8220;D&#8221; in the D1 and D2 designation stands for &#8220;down.&#8221; It seems that while L1 is considered to be the main level with a busy pedestrian walkway, D1 is &#8220;down one floor,&#8221; and D2 is &#8220;down two floors.&#8221; 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. (&#8220;If D2 is down two floors, is L2 up two floors? Up 2 floors from L1? Wait, that would make it L3??&#8221;) Or maybe they should have been required to take more liberal arts classes&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8230;I analyzed those years as a component of my memoir. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1927,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22219],"tags":[78,2051],"class_list":["post-430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-higher-education","tag-socialization"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/dean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/dean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/dean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/dean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1927"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/dean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/dean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":433,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/dean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430\/revisions\/433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/dean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/dean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/dean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}