I mentioned earlier that I lived essentially two separate lives in my undergraduate years. My life outside of the classroom was an attempt to continue to do the things that my parents had tried to prevent me from doing. Because I could not focus on studying theoretical computer science or physics, for the reasons explained previously, I turned my attention to what I believed would be happening in the near future in the Muslim world. I sat in on classes in history, religion, and languages, though I did not take them officially because I did not want my parents to see these courses on my transcript. There were a few people who knew that I was doing all of these things in additional to being in Engineering Science, and they always expressed amazement that I was able to pull it off. But I don’t think that this was actually all that impressive.
Whether engineering students should have to take courses in non-technical subjects was a question that was often debated in the engineering department. Some of the professors and administrators believed that engineering students should be more “well-rounded”, and the department required so many non-technical electives as a pre-requisite to graduation. Students, on the other hand, often balked at this and complained that non-technical electives were a distraction from an already heavy workload, and that furthermore, many of them would never see the non-technical subjects they took ever again. There were certain “bird courses” which alleviated this to some extent.
I found that sitting in on non-engineering courses actually allowed me to better focus on the engineering ones. My theory is that this was due to a sort of “mental crop rotation”. I saw many of my classmates completely exhaust themselves trying to understand some bit of mathematics; whereas when I became stuck, I would, for instance, go and decipher a Sanskrit poem, and return to find that I had become mathematically unstuck in the meantime. I think that this was because the engineering courses really engaged only one part of the brain, and rather than stress out that one part, it was a better strategy to distribute the load more evenly. In any case, I managed to study a lot of linguistics, history, and religion, all the while maintaining decent marks in engineering.
– davinci
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