gre writing issue sample writing 112
- Requiring university students to take a variety of courses outside their major fields of study is the best way to ensure that students become truly educated.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.
The statement above asserts that students benefit from exposure to a variety of courses outside of their primary interests. In some sense, it is hard to deny that experiences in a number of distinct areas are likely to stimulate our intellectual progress. However, I firmly believe that a hurly-burly effort sometimes presents more problems than it can offer true aids in our learning, including a superficial rather than in-depth thinking process as well as cursory efforts.
Of course, few would disagree that our intellectual growth largely depends on a number of stimulating effects we earn when exposed to various new experiences and unfamiliar perspectives. When it comes to the general power of imagination, the merit of interactions with other fields of study instead of being confined to one’s own focus seems clear. A student in economics can formulate more sophisticated ideas when he has some experience and knowledge in statistics, political science, psychology, or even art. Similarly, an effective, imaginative engineer student is generally one who can absorb principles and cultures unique to philosophy or social sciences.
With regard to expansion of appropriate vocabulary for several evasive topics in a given field, we can also find another type of merits coming from taking a variety of courses outside of one’s major field. Correct understanding of such terms as “inertia,” originally a word used only by physicists, has provide a number of different academic fields with a fine tool to analyze intractable phenomena; today, the word is used in the areas from philosophy through economics and even to music. “Evolution” is now a terminology that is used by many true scholars other than biologists. The bottom line is that this type of ‘barter’ of analytical terminologies is one of the most important consequences which come from lowered threshold between different fields of study.