John Slaughter

Several of Slaughter’s points hit close to home for me, but I think the one that I ended up thinking the most about was the idea of students being well rounded. Throughout my education I have often found myself disliking classes in the humanities, while still being somewhat interested in the topics themselves. I have been known to make references to various works of literature and events in history in regular conversation, often in a similar way to what many people would do with modern pop culture. As such I would describe myself as very confused shape, I’m interested in being well rounded sometimes, but usually the process is what I don’t enjoy. I think if some of the humanities can be presented in other ways then it could potentially be more attractive for people such as me.

Diversity is also something that I found rather interesting in this article.  It exactly a secret that it is somewhat lacking in the STEM fields. For the moment I’d like to focus on how gender plays a role in this. As someone whose mother was a programmer and sister is an engineer I know it’s possible for women to be involved in STEM fields, but at the time it is somewhat lacking. At one of the speeches that we listened to during the first week at Stevens we were told that the proportion of women in the future classes would be increasing in the next few years. This received the biggest applause of anything said during the speech. Maybe it is just that guys don’t want to not be around women during all of college, but I believe that there is more to it than that. Whether it be different genders or just different cultures, diversity can bring a lot to peoples’ lives, so I agree that it is something that we should be working towards.