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> No BS courses like philosophy, social sciences, etc. ....you totally missed the point of those classes.

• ben509 8y ago
  If a course, especially philosophy, can't justify its existence in all the hours of lectures, it has problems. It's fine to study something for the sake of studying it. I have no problem with a course on basket-weaving because it's an art and worthy of attention in its own right. As a center for higher learning that explores the full human experience, it's entirely justifiable that a university should consider a course in basket-weaving. But the academy is a human institution and subject to decay. More concrete courses like math are constantly checking themselves and anyone can work through proofs and say, "no, this is wrong," and get people back on track. Your basket-weaving course, on the other hand, has no practical moorings and can drift off into irrelevancy. FWIW, I did a minor in philosophy, and while I found it very enlightening, they pretty much admitted it was pointless.
• jimmaswell 8y ago
  They're hit or miss depending on the instructor. Too easy for bias to seep in in the more social science type classes. Not regarding any particular subject though, a breadth of experiences is always good because it gives you more contexts to think in and draw analogies from. Things like the behavior of ants influencing your thinking on distributed systems, issues of group communication brought up in a Communications class relevant to server architecture (connections in a group growing as a square), queue behavior in shopping centers/theme parks, thinking of Sherlock's investigation methods while debugging, lots of examples.