Thinking about Thinking (Week 1)

It has been three days into my foray into my new and exciting studies in another part of the UT campus. From the 5 classes I have attended so far -- it's quite evident that this is REAL education. Not to say that the education I have received prior to this is bogus, it's just that paying $33000 a year for education really changes your perspective on learning (as a business student would say, the opportunity cost is just that much greater). Also, the $33000 price tag also seems to reflect the passion and committment of the teaching and administrative faculty (albeit part of the reason is that it's a business school and of course, what they teach is what they have to believe in).

Coming into the program I really had no idea what to expect from it, how different it would be from engineering, what the workload will be like, and how the classes will be structured (as you can tell, I did extremely little research into understanding my next so-called career choice - although I don't regret my decision either). I kind of knew what to expect from the more technical and analytical courses of the program such as accounting, economics, and statistics. However, I was quite skeptical into whether or not I would enjoy the more "social-science" type courses of this program, which are the foundations of integrative thinking and managing people in organization (or organization behaviour as it's more commonly known as).

Being taught to be engineer really does make you a very stubborn and closed person. A better way to put it is that engineering is a very egotistical profession. We believe that we are better than everyone else (clearly evident in our Frosh week quarrels with other deparments, especially the arts and science department in general) and thusly we deserve all the attention because we are always right. I think this back-of-the-mind innate quality of an engineer probably makes us believe that we could be good business managers (which probably might explain why consistenly 50% of the incoming MBA class are engineers). Not to say this quality is a bad thing -- but it does lend to the fact that if you get an engineer to lead a group of people it will lead to a higher the chance the group will not mesh (of course, this is an over generalization -- which we've been just taught in integrative thinking not to do).

The previous paragraph was a bit of a tangent, but after the attending the two "social science" like classes, I grew quite inquisitive about what was being taught in them. Of course, being an engineering, I will innately hate them because they require essay writing However, at least I will enjoy the content (knowing in the back of my mind that these two courses will bring down my GPA). I feel completely engaged by the topic and it's interesting to see that my next two years will consist of mainly learning about thinking and thinking about thinking.

There are my patchwork like thoughts on paper from the past few days. It's mostly going to be boring reading for those who actually read it, but it's nice to think about the things I think about when I do my readings for my courses.