Do You Recognize Yourself Here?

You majored in science or technology or focused on one aspect of the humanities in college, and now you want to put your education and experience in a wider perspective.

The Curious Engineer

I enjoy learning new things.

I already think that:

1. Every non-trivial engineering problem involves learning something new.
2. Those plug-and-chug engineers never made anything all that great; and I was never really satisfied insofar as I was just plugging and chugging.
3. Most people don’t take things seriously enough.
4. The world would be better off if people thought carefully and responsibly about everything.
5. Applying my engineering brain to any topic in the past has usually yielded some fruit, even when other people supposedly know a lot (but often haven’t thought carefully and responsibly!).

I feel like my education has some gaps...

...because:

1. For years (in my engineering career) my mind rapidly oscillated between creating and absorbing.
2. As I gained experience, people needed me to create more, and help others create and absorb more – so I absorbed proportionally less, and the curiosity has been growing.
3. As I tackled harder problems, I saw how intricately and concretely everything is connected, grew increasingly suspicious of cookie-cutter solutions, and got better at noticing leaky abstractions.
4. Kids these days are reading Homer and Shakespeare and I can tell there’s something amazing there and vaguely remember that stuff from high school, but I haven’t really had a chance to look into it.

I want to relax without letting my brain rot...

...having already noticed that:

1. I become unhappy, discontent, antsy whenever my mind is simply turned off.
2. Merely switching off the brain does not automatically make it come back stronger.
3. The amount of pure time-wasting, attention-absorbing, thought-enervating garbage in the world apparently has no limit.
4. Nonsense hurts me more than mental exertion.

Scholars Online, in particular, offers the Curious Engineer, in particular...

1. Unusually well educated teachers – two out of three faculty have advanced degrees.
2. Serious commitment to STEM-humanities continuity – our main science instructor (PhD) worked at Boeing, NASA, and RAND; our main ancient Greek instructor (PhD) hand-coded our learning environment from scratch (still running!) years before web chat was a thing.
3. Convenient and engaging format – can multitask while dialoguing with other humans in real time.
4. A community that includes a mixture of adult and sub-adult students – as ‘childlike’ curiosity combines with ‘sage’ perspective in the engineer’s mind.

Learn more about our Science Curriculum

Browse our Currnt Catalog