Like a lot of undergraduates, Yulianna Estrada arrived in college excited about her major. What didn’t particularly interest her? Fulfilling her general-education requirements. In fact, she put them off until her junior year, packing her schedule at Boston University with biomedical engineering and pre-med courses instead. General education, by contrast, was something “that I just had to get done,” she says.

When she finally dug into her options, Estrada was pleasantly surprised. A sociology course tackled the complex topic of gender. A history course got her thinking about the ethical dilemmas embedded in medicine. She learned, for example, that some early advances in gynecology were made at the expense of enslaved women. For her final project she included research on lobotomies, which were used at times on women who were considered difficult or different.