http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/correlation.png This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/correlation.png
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. As many of my readers know, I am graduating from my nursing program this semester. Of course, like all of the other majors in the school, in addition to Nursing and health related classes, I am required to take co-requisites. Some of them, like Anatomy and Physiology, biology, Microbiology, Psychology, and even English, are easily correlated to my career goals. The information covered in these classes are obviously required for successful integration into this field. But what about some of the other classes? When am I ever going to need to understand theories in Sociology, issues in history or economics, or even figure out a trigonometric equation?

Some of these, I honestly can’t tell you, except that one day I may have a patient who is a mathematician, and I may need to understand some basic equations to get something across to him. But, since they are required, and I will be sitting through those classes anyway, doesn’t it make sense for me to derive some benefit from these classes?

I recently discovered that most subjects can be correlated to any curriculum. For example, I took Effective Speaking last semester. Each speech that I gave was somehow connected to the material I was covering anyway. In this way, the hours spent studying, researching, and writing will hopefully be put to good use in my career.

I’d love to hear about your ways of connecting seemingly unconnected topics to benefit your total education.