Sunday, December 4, 2016

Final Post

I will address the first option for this week’s prompt. To begin with, I didn’t really know what to expect when taking this course. This was my fourth 400-level Economics course taken for my major, so I had built some expectations on this previous experience. Also, a good friend of mine had taken this course a few semesters ago that was able to provide a little information as to what I would expect from the class. I understand that there have been some changes, but my guess is these changes didn’t have too large of an effect on the overall outcomes of the course.
With that being said, I would have liked the in class session to be a little different. I understand that attendance was not mandatory and I didn’t attend on a regular basis. I think I would have attended more if there were more of a set topic with a powerpoint or slides. The classes I did attend I often felt confused on what was being talked about most likely due to there not being a powerpoint to follow along with. This isn’t a large issue, though. I personally really liked the excel assignments we had for the class. I have had previous excel experience from other courses I have taken, but I believe the assignments in this class showed different ways that excel can be used and how it can be helpful in the business world. Some of these assignments were quite tough and at times I was confused on what exactly I should be doing. But for the most part I looked forward to working on these when they were due. I also really enjoyed the quizzes that we had. I was expecting to take in class exams, so it was a little bit different to adjust to the quizzes. However, I think that the quizzes were effective in testing what we have learned in the class as well as provided insight to areas that we should have learned more. Some of the blogs I found to be an annoyance at times. I don’t think this is because of the actual nature of the blogging, but rather I ran into mental roadblocks while writing some of the blogs where I didn’t really know what to write about. I do think that having us comment on our classmate’s blogs was a great way to get more insight on the topic and receive feedback for the work we had already done ourselves.
To add to my outlook on the homeworks, I preferred working on the excel assignments as compared to the blog posts. I usually worked on the excels days in advance where as it would take me more time to get the blogs done. This could be in part to myself being more inclined to do math problems over writing assignments.

I also think that the things we learned about organizations in the class will be very beneficial once we join the workforce. For example the last couple of blogs we have done have forced us to learn and think about specific parts of an organization. From the topic on group dynamics to personal reputation within an organization, these blogs while looking at individual parts of an organization will really help when trying to be successful in an organization in a few years. I also really liked the blog on the principle-agent model. This is a model I have had a lot of work with in previous courses, but haven’t learned about in the same context. As my college career has progressed, I have learned more of how what I will more than likely be doing in a few years directly relates to this model. All in all I enjoyed the content we learned in this class. I personally wasn’t the biggest fan of the way the in class sessions went.