College

[milz]

No: HPFGUIDX 5178

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, Sheryll Townsend <s_ings at y...> 
wrote:
> 
> --- DrMM <drmm at f...> wrote:
> > The college student responds to the U.S. college
> > system questions. . . .
> > 
> > Another example is my father.  He's an engineer. 
> > He's told me upon 
> > occasion that many of his classmates became
> > engineers so they wouldn't have 
> > to take many English classes.  Then he laughs and
> > says,"But I write more as 
> > an engineer than I ever did when I was in school." 
> > The point being that 
> > you can never know what skills you need when you get
> > into the real world.
> > 
> I really had to chuckle at that one. I used to work as
> an office manager at an engineering consulting company
> and none of the engineers there had very good writing
> skills. At one point the President made them all take
> writing courses, and none of them could understand
> why. At least the President recognized his lack of
> skills and always had one of us check everything he
> wrote. I once refused to send a fax for one of the
> engineers - it had 17 mistakes on 2 pages of text (he
> even started 5 paragraphs on the second page with the
> words "And so, therefore.."!). He didn't see what was
> wrong with what he had written. When I asked on of the
> other engineers, he said they didn't have to take
> English (Communication) as one of their courses. So
> much for the wonderful Canadian education system.
> 
> Sheryll
> 

My college required something similar called a "Core Curriculum": it 
required one science class, one math class, 2 English classes, 2 
History or Political Science, 1 Art or Music, 1 Philosophy, 2 
Theology, 1 Sociology or Psychology. I was a Biology Major. I remember 
a lot of the other Science Majors complaining about the non-science 
courses we had to take. But in retrospect, I'm pretty happy that I 
took those non-science classes when I did. I'm in the medical field 
now. I think that this non-science smattering helps in my dealings 
with non-medical people. Actually, I kind of regret that I didn't take 
more liberal arts classes.

:-) Milz