Stan Wilczek Jr., Keuka College
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The merits of having both technical and liberal arts skills are becoming more apparent for driving innovation in the workplace. What is not so well defined is how a student should obtain these skills. Conventional thinking would dictate a strong liberal arts base prior to pursuing more technical related skills. Although this may have been the preferred approach in the past, the current potential cost for this path (including direct education expenses, lost earnings opportunity, lost on-the-job-training, and lost career mentoring ) is now out of reach for most students and more importantly might never be recoverable over the students career/lifetime.
There may be a more viable and cost effective path to obtaining both sets of skills if the overall goal of the student is to pursue a more technically related field. By incorporating strategic liberal arts related curricula into the engineering format AND developing and implementing a lifelong plan of informal liberal arts related education, a student can embark on her career sooner, obtain experience and mentoring, and still reap the benefits of a technical education enhanced with a liberal arts spectrum.
The presentation will:
– summarize the importance of balancing technical and liberal arts skill sets in various professions
– review through case study examples how an imbalance of these skills has led to less than desirable results in society
– show why the conventional approach to integrating technical and liberal arts skills is no longer viable
– provide a plan to efficiently and effectively integrate strategic liberal arts curricula into an engineering education
– outline a lifelong plan for obtaining general knowledge of a wide range of subjects in an efficient and economical manner