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12/09/08(Tue)03:48:39 No.2382248  >>2382165
I
don't mean so much in choosing a major. Suppose you were a Comp Sci
major who was forced to take Chem 1 in your first year. Your second
year you decided, for whatever reason, that you wanted to major in
chem. Because you were forced to take it in your first year you don't
have to start at the very beginning.
And also, obviously, not
every case is the same. Just because your school may not provide the
hardest level of GE courses around does not necessarily mean the whole
idea of taking GE courses is bad.
I may not be describing what
i'm about to say adequately, but let's give it a try. When you major in
a subject, any subject, essentially you are looking at the world from
one specific perspective (e.g. from a strictly mathematical way or a
strictly artistic, etc.) but by understanding something about other
perspectives you can get a much better idea of the big picture about
things.
In addition to this, there is the mental benefit of
having taken the course. Consider, say, a basic course in calculus. In
terms of the actual content, does say, an art or english major get
anything out of it? Quite obviously, no. But they get something else
out of the experience: they are forced to think in a different way,
they are forced to think about things the way that a mathematician
would (or at least to an extent they are forced to do this). Because of
this, one develops different areas of the brain and different ways of
thinking about things that can be applied to far more practical
situations than finding the derivative of some polynomial. |
