Emily Powell, a School of Hospitality and Administration sophomore, said learning about law, engineering and public health in the same class isn’t as disjointed as it may seem.
“It’s like a succession of useful information that kind of feeds into each other and is intertwined,” she said.
Emily Powell is one of 138 students in the Arvind and Chandan Nandlal Kilachand Honors College at Boston University. The course, called “Insights & Invention,” pushes students to understand fields with which they’re not familiar.
“The idea of the course is to try to give students some insight into how scholars go about their scholarship, go about understanding their field and developing the knowledge that students and others then base their studies on,” said Stacey Dogan, who taught the law section in the spring.
Students look into the concepts behind subjects such as physics, history, classics, law, engineering and public health.
Dogan said the three professors teaching the course in spring semester worked together to try to achieve some continuity from one section to the next, relating the three seemingly different subjects to each other.
“We talked about intellectual property law, and then [we learned about] biomedical engineering,” Powell said. “We were discussing cancer research, and we brought in a couple of intellectual property components and found that law background to be very useful.”
Jesse Goldshear, a College of Arts and Sciences sophomore, said “Insights & Invention” continues the honor college’s goal of offering a broad-based curriculum.
“The goal of the honors college really is to present a really well-rounded curriculum and not just to help you hone in on one specific subject,” Goldshear said.
Goldshear, who studies biology, said he plans to pursue a field in research. However, he noted his career would likely involve subjects and skills beyond pure science.
Powell said the different points of view taught in the class helped her understand how other people think.
“I’ll think a certain way because I’ve been trained by a hospitality school, but it will be very useful if I talk to someone like the engineer in a hotel,” she said. “If I’m the general manager of a hotel and I have to talk to head of engineering, I’ll understand that he’s going to be more technical.”
Sheina Godovich said the class was a change from her usual CAS classes.
“It’s definitely refreshing,” she said. “It’s nice to break from things I would normal go toward. I would never take a class on classics.”
Dogan said the students in “Insights & Invention” are highly capable, even with advanced material.
“I certainly found in my unit that people jumped in with their feet first and eagerly participated in really high level [of discussion],” she said. “It’s a little challenging in some other fields and I think finding the right balance between making it meaningful . . . but also making it accessible is a challenge.”
Despite the advanced material, students said the workload is no more difficult than their other classes.
“I wouldn’t say it’s more difficult,” Powell said. “It’s different. Sometimes we’re pulled out of our comfort zone a little bit. It just exposes us to a different structure of a class.”
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
