I always thought my college education was backwards, with the exception that differential equations (and laplace transforms, which can help lay the groundwork f

I always thought my college education was backwards, with the exception that differential equations (and laplace transforms, which can help lay the groundwork for other transforms) came early enough that I could get by -- though it'd have been better if they were earlier, like high school, and if I hadn't been able to skip two semesters of calculus thanks to my HS calculus then differential equations would have come even later in college. But as a CE student at a school nominally more about video game making education I ended up first taking as CS electives an audio processing course, and then an image processing course, before the CE side reached control systems, which I had to retake after taking the next digital signal processing course, after which control systems made a lot more sense. It was only after graduating that I felt like I had reached a level of sophistication to go back and really grok all the related theory and go deep into applications. Maybe that's how graduate students are meant to feel? But I just went into full time enterprise work and 'retired' after 6 years of that, so I've since forgotten a lot... Still, the concept of feedback has proved useful in systems analysis from time to time, and it's a framework that I think could yield many low hanging fruit in other disciplines. (The book Behavior: The control of perception applies control theory to psychology in a convincing way but it's understandably been neglected by psychologists who aren't often very sophisticated mathematically.)