I took a business law class in undergrad, which ended up being surprisingly interesting and pretty useful. I still don’t understand intellectual property law, but I’m beginning to think that no one does.

I would argue that design can exist very well without aesthetic (but I design supply chains, and aesthetics aren’t a big consideration). Instead, I would say that design can’t exist without attention to the lives and world-views of others, which ties in very closely with philosophy.

I definitely agree that all disciplines are very interconnected. A few schools have interesting design programs (Northwestern and Stanford are the two I know of) that are open to all majors, so they have philosophers and engineers and artists and political scientists all trying to solve design problems together. I think that would be a very interesting experience.

That is very good to know, and something I’ll definitely have to look into. I’ve always struggled with how to bring up topics like that, that just don’t fit into most engineering classes.

I completely agree with you that more opportunities and resources should be available for people to talk about things like gender or sexuality. I just don’t know how to help make that happen. I’m in the ISE department, and I don’t know how I could even bring the topic up. I mean, my sexual orientation doesn’t exactly come up naturally in a class about databases (surprising, I know). Any thoughts on how you would have liked your professors to broach the topic? If one of them had the “Safe Zone” paragraph in their syllabus, like Dr. Nelson does, would you have gone to talk to them?

I’m a military brat as well, and I had a similar experience. I won’t claim that my upbringing was completely without racial prejudice, but I think it was less prevalent than that of some of my friends (particularly those from very small, racially-homogeneous towns). We always had neighbors and friends of different races, and I really don’t remember noticing much. In many of the places I lived, the “us versus them” mentality had more to do with military vs. non-military than race or social class.

Like you, I thought that listing things like “where are you from” as microaggressions went way too far. I’ve lived in a lot of different places in my life, so when I ask where people are from (and I ask everyone, no matter their skin tone or accent), I’m usually just wondering, “Did I live near you at some point?” And, honestly, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying, “You look and speak differently from me. I wonder where you grew up.” I understand the push to be “colorblind,” but we can’t stop noticing people’s differences entirely. The differences are what make life interesting!

I’m not discounting microaggressions entirely. I acknowledge that they do exist and can cause real problems. And I don’t at all mean to discount people’s feelings or say that they shouldn’t feel the way they do. But really, some things are just honest questions. If you choose to interpret “Where are you from?” as “Wow, you must not be from around here because you look/sound different and that’s weird,” then you are adding your own issues to a normal, civil conversation.

There is definitely a big gap in the number of men vs. women working in the STEM fields, both in academia and industry, and I’m certain that part of it comes from a stereotype that “girls aren’t good at math.” But I think that fewer women are pursuing jobs in those fields for other reasons as well. Part of it is the discrimination that many women face, not because of the “bad at math” stereotype, but just because they’re women in a traditionally men’s field. Part of it is the difficulties women in fields like that face if they decide to have children (which, to a certain extent, goes back to the “traditionally men’s field” thing). Part of it may very well be the lack of female role models, though I think that’s changing. There are a myriad of reasons, and the math stereotype is just one.

I hadn’t heard that we might be swinging the other way now in terms of boys in math and science. Maybe instead of really encouraging girls in the STEM fields, we should be encouraging all children to pursue math and science.

That’s true, there is much more of a push for girls in science and engineering now. Though, to be honest, the tone of some of it seems to be, “Don’t listen to the stereotypes! You’re just as good as the boys!” I never picked up on that as a kid (not realizing the stereotype existed), but I see it sometimes now.

I’m an industrial engineer, but I actually do very little arithmetic. The “Fast Math” competition in fourth grade involved being able to perform complicated arithmetic (adding large numbers, etc.) very quickly. I think I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve had to add large numbers without a calculator since high school. I’m sure that having that skill has helped me in other, more subtle, ways during my life, but it’s not directly useful to me anymore. I was so proud when I was 9, though!