The Value of a Liberal Arts Education

When entering Westminster College as a first year, one of the first things you hear is about the value of a liberal arts education. Basically, this means that a college believes by taking many different courses in many different field you can broaden your horizon of education. Some of the classes I've had to take to fulfill this requirement include writing, speech, swimming, political sceine, philosophy and many others. I have enjoyed all of the courses I have taken here at Westminster but the one class I had the toughest time grasping was Astronomy. I took Astronomy last semester with Dr. Lightner. Dr. Lightner was a wonderful professor and full of life and knowledge. This man was literally an encyclopedia on Astronomy! I respected him very much and was glad to be in his last class before he retired from Westminster. So I do not blame my difficulty in this course on the professor at all, but I just never really learned to grasp it. I went into Astronomy thinking "This should be an easy science course, we'll just study planets and stars and the galaxies." While we did do those things, Astronomy is much more involved than just studying starts and planets. By definition, Astronomy is scientific study of celestial objects (such as stars, planets, comets, and galaxies) and phenomena that originate outside the Earth's atmosphere (such as the cosmic background radiation). It is concerned with the evolution, physics, chemistry, meteorology, and motion of celestial objects, as well as the formation and development of the universe. As you can see, there are many different types of sciences involved in the study of Astronomy. We learned a wide array of information while in the course, and I definnitely thought the class was interesting and inspired me to learn more. The information was so complex however that no matter how long I studied, I always came up a little bit short. I passed the class successfully though and I am actually glad I took this course because I believe it opened up my mind to many things I normally wouldn't think about. The value of a liberal arts education is very apparent to me now, and has showed me how it can help me grow.