Universities should require every student to take a variety of courses outside the student's field of study.Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the claim. In developing and supporting your position, be sure

Universities hold the responsibility for planning the curriculum of the programs they offer; such that the students acquire the skill sets the society looks for. Every day, the world faces new problems in all spheres of life, and men are looking for solutions to these. To solve most of these problems, multidisciplinary knowledge is required. Therefore, it is natural that, for universities to cultivate multidisciplinary thinking, they should encourage the student to study courses outside their major field of study.

Many inventions in the past century have been a result of borrowing of ideas and design from one area of science and applying it to solve another analogous problem after appropriate changes were made. Genetic algorithms, now popularly used in computer science to solve computationally intensive problems, were inspired by the evolutionary mechanisms studied in biology. Lizards and other crawling reptiles have been the motivating factor for engineers to build robots which are capable of crawling and climbing vertical surfaces.

One cannot disagree with the fact that exposure to new concepts and ideas from different walks of life foster ideation. Google Inc. has taken this so seriously that their employees are encouraged to work on their own interests for twenty percent of their weekly working hours. This has lead to a lot of innovative products being built in Google labs, Google Finance being one of the successful ones.

On similar lines when students are exposed to concepts from new fields of study it helps them look at their own study areas with a different perspective. This not only helps in sustaining the student’s interest in their field of study but also leads to ideas which could be pivotal in solving problems of the present day. Global warming, for example, is a grave problem that the world is facing today. To find effective solutions to global warming, knowledge about the environment is necessary. But an environmentalist, without the help of an engineer can do nothing to cut down the emission of harmful green houses gases from refrigerators and air conditioners. For the engineer to realize the seriousness of the problem and be convinced that a solution is necessary, he has to have basic exposure to environmental and ecological sciences.

Therefore, students should be encouraged to study subjects outside their major field of study. This will kindle the creativity in them and encourage them to think differently, and consequently contribute more to the society. It is the role of the university to persuade the students to study other subjects and cultivate this culture.