Work in Progress: Electrical Engineering from an Unusual Perspective: A Broader View for First-Year Students Using Francis Bacon, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Thomas Friedman, Et Al.

Students benefit from being aware of the broader context of electrical engineering topics, and a first-year introductory course can provide a setting to bring together and discuss a number of broader-view examples. An interesting way to compile examples is to begin with authors outside of electrical engineering and show the connections of some of their ideas back to electrical engineering. Such an approach, using quotations from philosopher Bacon, novelist Garcia Marquez, journalist Friedman, and many other authors from diverse fields, was employed in the development of a lecture that was given to first-year electrical and computer engineering students at Texas Tech University. Positive student evaluations of the lecture lend support to the basic approach and encourage future expansion and improvement of the lecture material