During my time at Iowa State, I didn’t just focus on engineering and the technical details. I also took classes to help with problem solving and the more human components of engineering. The two classes that helped me most with this were Philosophy 201 (Intro to Philosophy) and Religion 210 (Religion in America). Even before discrete math, philosophy taught me logic, logical fallacies, and ethics while religion is what gave me a more global human perspective to keep in mind when tackling engineering problems.

Starting with philosophy, we covered basic logic concepts like and, or, not, and implies in the context of argumentation. This provided a more challenging, yet intuitive way to explore these concepts before it was later covered in my discrete math course. Keeping these argumentation styles in mind, we analyzed a variety of philosophical works and their arguments. While this may seem disconnected from the world of programming and engineering at first, it’s not too far off from analyzing your code to solve its inconsistencies.

Aside from the basic technique of argumentation and proofs, applying this allowed us to gain experience in a variety of philosophical fields. Among these, one of the most applicable has to be ethics. Engineering, especially in cybersecurity, tackles ethics all the time. While the ethics page will show off more applied ethical theory in the field, this class gave a great general baseline for ethics not only in engineering, but in life to. We covered figureheads in the space like Kant and Locke before being required to apply it to our own decisions no matter the outcome. On top of this, we also covered more ephemeral concepts like knowledge and reality which helped me understand how abstraction can be used to help wrangle the infinite complexity of problems when real world complications are added. Abstraction is especially powerful in the world of computers where it is rare to have a full understanding of every system involved.

In addition to more heady classes, classes like Religion 210 gave me a more grounded and humanitarian perspective. The class covered a variety of religions found across the US like Christianity (including many of its denominations), Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Wicca, Vodou, and Native American religious beliefs. To do this, we were required to read and analyze both primary and academic sources. These sources allowed both an educational baseline covering beliefs and history as well as a more personal look at how these beliefs impact believers daily lives. In this look at how it impacts the everyday lives of people, it was also important to cover the struggles that came from these beliefs and how others reacted. Keeping these struggles in mind can then help to inform the design requirements of any resultant product. For example, Orthodox Jewish people cannot interact with technology on the Sabbath, so some elevators were designed to stop at every floor on the Sabbath to prevent the need for people to interact with them.

Using all of the lessons and information gained from these classes among others has made me a more well rounded engineer able to solve more complex problems in an inclusive way.