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Hi Everyone,

This is my first post on urch and I recently took my second GRE practice test. Please find below my issue essay question stem along with the response. Please rate my response and kindly highlight my improvement areas. Thanks in advance.

 

Undergraduate students majoring in Business or in the Sciences should not be required to take any courses in the Humanities since those courses won’t benefit their future careers.

 

Write a response to the prompt in which you discuss whether or not you agree or disagree. Be certain to fully develop your position and carefully consider ways in which your position could be challenged.

A student always learns multiple things during the course of his/her education. Not everything is futile, and not everything is useful. Having a well rounded understanding of all topics can help students deliver better results in the long run. Hence, I disagree with the stance taken in the prompt about undergraduate students majoring in fields such as Business or Science to not take courses in other fields such as Humanities for primarily two reasons.

 

To begin, education is something that can never be commensurated in terms of limit i.e. it is very rare for any field to be so niche that it deems knowledge gained in that field as sufficient. Over the years, we have observed multiple fields converging with each other to beget stupendous results. To illustrate this, we can take the example of the economics and finance that are a beautiful amalgation of mathematics /calculations and human elements that impact the imminent trends in the market. To estimate sales of a product, the company can have calculations based on statistical data that could determine what should be behavior of market in the upcoming months, but analyzing the confidence of people in the product and understanding the need of the hour for people can really help take the prediction to much higher levels of precision. Thus, based on the above argument, we can say that having knowledge of other fields can act as a boon.

Further, having a wholistic approach and understanding of topics definitely helps people blur the lines and transition between fields on a need basis. An idea to support the argument would be to look at Elon Musk who is a perfect embodiment of science and humanitarian shades. He has a pioneer in the field of science and technology for a very long time and has benefitted the technology world with products and his companies such as PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX etc. But the vision that he carries to carry the human race to Mars in the upcoming years is only a testament to his humanitarian aspect that can truly be achieved if one delves deep into humanities along with science. Thus diving deeper proves beneficial in the long run and can be proved by many such examples.

Having said that, there is another way to look at it by considering learning things apart from the field of specialization of the individual can turn him/her into "jack of all trades, master of none." This is obliquely possible, but on the contrary, a person who is focused on his field of specialization will definitely find it easier to accommodate the knowledge gained from other fields in a way that does not impact his/her current ability to master the desired field. In fact, an erudite person is expected to utilize the gained knowledge in his/her field to yield better results. To put it succintly, knowledge never goes in vain.

To conclude the response, I would like to disagree with the argument and state with the help of the above given points that undergraduate students majoring in Business or in the Sciences should be required to take courses in other fields such as Humanities to help them benefit in the long run.

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