After reviewing my previous posts, I was able to see two clear connections between my respective posts. The first connections I saw were between the post on my experience in organizations (Johnson Controls) and the experience of being on a successful team (Illini Tennis). After reading through these two posts, I was able to reiterate in my head what intangible truly made for a successful group. In my Product Development Project group, each member brought unique skills and experience to the team. Because of this, we were able to clearly distinguish what roles each member would play in making the project an utter success. I felt the same way when describing what made the Illini Tennis team of 2015-2016 so successful. We all knew what role we had to play on the team in order to achieve our desired results. To summarize, in order to be successful when operating in a group of people, which is inevitable for all college students, you have to know your specific role within the group. If everyone around you understands their unique role, and executes that role to the best of their potential, then your group should find success.
The other connection I saw was between two different posts: Opportunism and Illini Bucks. This connection reiterated the idea of allocation of resources, which is commonly used in the study of economics. When I missed an opportunity for a coveted internship, it was because I decided to use my time, knowledge, and energy towards pursuing my professional tennis career. I could have better utilized these resources towards the internship, preparing me for my life after college and tennis, but instead I somewhat wasted those resoureces. In regards to the Illini Bucks, no matter where you would use your Illini bucks, whether that be for class registration, study room time at BIF, or being first for a specific book at the bookstore, you had to allocate those Illini Bucks in a specific way in order to maximize your potential utility.
After seeing these connections, I was also able to see a big change in the way I wrote my first post to the way I wrote my last post, and I'm looking forward to more developments moving forward in the posts. The prompts for these posts played a large role in these developments, but I do believe that I put more time and more emphasis on economic principles in later posts. These principles were not necessarily the ones we talked about in class, but are ones from past economics courses such as opportunity costs, shortages, surpluses and things of that nature. I think being able to use real life examples and writing about these examples helped evolve my blog writing process and I'm sure that it will only come easier and easier the more in depth we get in class, and the more I continue to write blog posts.
Going forward, I would like to see myself go more in depth with the economic principles. I started by not really mentioning much at all, then progressed to mentioning more of these principles, while slightly expanding on them. Moving forward, I want to really push myself to go in depth on these economic principles. I believe I can make this happen if I continue to critically look at the prompts for the posts and more importantly the economic material involved. By asking more questions, I will be able to find the depth in the material that I want to find, in addition to being able to uncover bigger connections between economics and the things around me. Also, I'd like to utilize more of the material that we discuss in class. At this point in time, I haven't seen many opportunities to use this information even though I'm now looking out for them more than ever. By using more material covered in class in these blog posts, I'll be able to view this material much more in depth, as well as do better in future blog posts and assignments.
Let me focus on the last paragraph, pushing yourself intellectually. Because of your tennis, you may have a better sense than some of the other students in the class about what it means to push yourself in preparation for a match and in general to raise your game. The question is, what does it take to push yourself mentally?
ReplyDeleteHere is an answer that may surprise you. The key is reading. Some of this is general interest reading, not related to the blog posts at all. If you read good non-fiction essays, such as are published in the top newspapers or in good general interest magazines, you will get a sense of what a well argued piece is like. You will see what sort of evidence is brought to bear. You will see whether the writer has chose to being with an anecdote or to talk up front about the general issue. In other words, by reading such pieces you will be provided with the type of examples that you should be trying to emulate.
The other sort of reading is on pieces that directly speak to the ideas in the prompt. It is, of course, good to have your own experiences to connect. But what of the experiences and ideas of others? Can you learn for those? Now with this latter type of reading do note that there is a lot of junk on the Internet and not all of it should serve as a model for you. Part of the skill, which is called information literacy, is to identify those pieces that relevant and well considered. That's what you should be reading.
I agree with the point you made regarding the usefulness of incorporating economic concepts in our writing in order to better understand the material. Through writing these blog posts, and reading the posts of my team, I have noticed that the content of the blog posts have gotten progressively more oriented towards addressing the prompt with an economic mindset rather than in a "storytelling" mindset.
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