Management Poem

From the day we met Professor Kurpis,
we yearned to learn management.
We joined the group for extra credit,
which was fun and exciting.
We wrote our blogs constantly,
for the 20% of the grade.
We spent time to study,
we went through our difficulties.
We had a tough class,
but we loved the experience.

Communication

I have to say that it’s the first class that ever has blog assignment in my experience. It’s unique and interesting, it helps student to recall the class activities right after it. With the blog assignment, we think more deeply into the subject matter we learned from the class assignment and the group experience.

The blog assignments increase both way communications among the class. All students are able to express their thoughts in both of their own blogs and others. Even for those students who are introvert during the class, they can communicate their opinions through their blogs. Also, blogging enhances the intimacy among the class. For students who want to know other students better, we can just click on their blogs and share opinions. This helps to build friendship among us.

I think that the blog assignment should be continued as part of student’s grade. It is kind of providing students a leisure moment and a great experience from those stressful exams. For personal purpose, I think that writing blog can enhance my writing, reading and communication. It’s a good way for me to learn more about myself and the others. Therefore, I will continue my blog writing even after the class is over.

I'm a C-S-D-I type

The personal profile system I had done in the class shows that I’m a C-S-D-I, which is exactly a tick (the same as professor). According to the personal profile system, I’m a typically a conscientiousness, who is “being diplomatic with people”, “thinking analytically”, “checking for accuracy and etc. I think the descriptions are pretty much about my personality, of course there are more things about me. Beside conscientiousness, I’m also very steady, such as “desiring to help others”, “showing loyalty” and “creating a stable, harmonious work environment.” It also describes a major part of me.
I always think that people who are located in dominance and influence type usually receive more attention from the others. I used to think that if I change my personality that is more active, it will help me to achieve more sucessfully in every aspect, such as relationship with people in school and career environment. Being able to dominate is very much equal to being popular. However, I think different now; people who are conscientious and steady also have their uses. Even though we don’t talk much and doing things consistently, we can still work our way out and do better than others.
I think this personal profile system is telling only a part of us, it doesn’t involve the whole story of us. There is much more precious value within us that have been developed and we should really work hard on discovering them.

I believe that the movie “Vision” during the class is very critical and useful to students on management. Vision varies from person to person, since everyone has different goal, their visions will be different. It’s very important that we make a list of vision and perform actions to achieve it. People with vision and enable it with actions are always being more successful than the others.
Personally, I have a lot of goals to accomplish. For examples, I want to finish my degree in one and half year, and then find a perspective job after I’m graduated. I also want to travel around the world once I save enough money. I feel that life is too short that we need to enjoy the goodness and always compensate ourselves. I think all these things have to be managed step by step. You always feel that rush things out will not get the best result out of them.

Decision Making

Every student in Professor Kurpis’s classes have engaged in decision making process such as building the egg protection, searching for a particular poster, deciding how much employees you need to open up a pizza restaurant and etc. Those were all the fun time we all had enjoyed in this semester. Different to the usual entertaining decision making we had encountered in the class, we came to a critical moment for a major decision making on Mar, 9 2009 – the day we had to come up an absolute agreement from the whole class on how to deal with our exams.

Since many students are not satisfied with their first mid term exam, Professor Kurpis agreed to let us make a 100% agreement from the whole class on how do we like to adjust the next exam and what to do with out first exam. In the beginning, it seemed like an easy and exciting task, just to say and do whatever I wanted and Professor Krupis could not reject them. However, the procedure in this decision making turned out to be tough since we are not only dealing with a group with 4 to 5 people, we are dealing with the whole class, estimate about 80 students. At the moment, we were allowed only one hour of discussion on the decision making. Time was very critical to everyone. As the discussion started, everyone started to buzz around with their own opinions. All of the sudden, the class became extremely noisy. No one come up to organize the discuss until about 10 minutes later a guy who sat in the front came up to say stuff like letting someone write down our opinions and then we voted for the best one. This guy played a big role in helping us to get together and focus on our attention.

During the discussion, some people wanted only multiple - choices and some people wanted essay part. It’s hard for us to make an absolute decision since everyone got their own capabilities and voices of opinions. There were a lot of agreements and disagreements. I didn’t join the discussion much because most of my thoughts are already told by the others. Many people raise their hands to disagree when I wanted to. Also, I felt like there was too much voice and many people were just combating and arguing on the same thing over and over. There was a moment of time that people were losing control and getting temper in favor of their decisions. I was a little passive in this decision making procedure because I didn’t feel like to reject others’ decisions in favor of mine. I think all the opinions from the other had their usefulness to help students achieve a best grade. But I did rise up my hand to vote for my favorite decision.

We accomplished our decision just at the moment the class ended. The result turned out to be a satisfactory to all of us since it involved everyone’s opinion in it. It was a fair decision because it didn’t favor one person over the other. Everyone in the class played a major part in it. This practice made me understand more about decision making. As the number of people who can make decisions gets larger, it becomes harder and time consuming to make a best decision because no one wants to be ignored and omitted as a part. Therefore, there will be more opinions and more ideas come up when there are more people. And it becomes harder for us to choose the best one out of many decisions.

More planning

The ''An Eggs-cellent Way to Plan'' helps me to understand a lot of things need a careful planning in advance in order to reach the objective. I believe our group totally learn this from the game.

The game was to decide how use 8 straws and 2 feets long tape to build a protection for an egg so that it wouldnt break when it hit the ground from two feets high. Also, we had to be careful not to cover 50% of surface of the egg. We had 30 minutes planning before the procedure of building the protection.

Some of the members in our group were making different graphs and designs about the outfit for the egg. We were pretty sucessful in coming out different fantastic ideas of doing it. However, we didn't have enough mangement to combine our ideas as the time was running out fastly.

I think that if we had more time to come out a combined graph of our protection device for the egg, we could have suceeded in winning the game. I think what is need to be done just if we can restart the game again. We should asign a leader to drop down everyone's idea and think about a new, combined one or to choose a preferable idea. This will be more effective to get a better idea without time wasting. Moreover, we should let the person with the best building skill to build the protection for the egg. If the protection is not solid or tough enough, it will be break easily. Moreover, we can choose the shortest person in our group to drop the egg so that the length from the person's hand to the floor can be as limit as possible.

My biggest obstacle at the moment

There are many problems occur while I'm living with my grandparents. My grandparents are very traditional thinking people. they have to go to bed early everyday around 8.30pm and get up very early in the morning. Most of the time when I get home either from school or work, they have already fallen into sleep. I have to keep quiet and make no noise when I get home because my grandfather is sleeping in the living room and I'm sharing a room with my grandmother. Many times they will be disturbed when I turn the light on. I have a hard time doing my own things and study when at home since I do not want to disrupt their sleeping. They always complain that I stay up too late and they think I should do my study in the morning. But I'm a person that I could hardly get up and concentrate in the morning. I think I need a better time management and room setting in order to accommodate both life styles in the household. I want to find a way that make both of our lives easier and happier and I have not yet know what to do.