Connecting the Dots
As I looked through my previous
posts I can see how my writing has improved as well as how much more I have to
go. I always loved written exams, there is something about being given a
question and having to concisely write down all the information necessary to
answer it always appealing to me. I like to be able to define terms and
explain them in light examples given in the book or discussed in class. Essays are a very different
story, I find it extremely hard to come up with examples for
general questions, I like objectivity and simplicity. Yes, no and why answers. For
this reason, I saw this class as a personal challenge. The blog posts would
force me to become a better writer and be able to extend my knowledge and ideas
from 200 words to 600-1000 words. And to a certain extent it has been both a
challenge and a learning experience.
I started with vague and not very
descriptive posts about past experiences with RSO’s and now as I read my blog I
can see how much more descriptive I have become. Transactions costs are a recurrent
topic on my posts whether it is to talk about the structure and organization of
the RSO’s, or to discuss opportunism and Illini Bucks I think we have stressed
the term very well on the class discussions.
Another topic that is tied
throughout my posts is structure. The structure of the RSO’s I was involved in,
the structure around class times and registration. The topic was discussed in class and tied to B&D’s chapter 5. Structure and organization was personally the most interesting topic that we have discussed in class since I want to work for a corporation and will most likely hold a management
position in the future.
The knowledge about
intrinsic/extrinsic motivations, monitoring, upstream vs. downstream, how to
form a successful team and how to minimize/eliminate transaction costs are
crucial to any manager that wants to have good results. And I wish I had
explored them deeper on my blog posts.
Those course themes and ideas
that are more obvious to me now after we discussed them in class. For example,
when I read B&D’s chapter five the first thing that came to my mind was my
second blog post and how I could have talked about self-managing teams, team
structure and top performance and how I could have used those ideas to guide
the RSO through the time of “crisis”.
Writing process
I start out
by reading the prompt and any reading suggestions that go along with the
prompt. Reading the book is usually very helpful to me before writing my blog
post since I can just highlight and takes notes as I read and then condense
them into a paper and write my blog post around the ideas discussed in the
book.
When the blog posts are based on
purely experience or when I cannot relate, I am almost always stuck at this
pre-writing phase, maybe now that me and my group have a group text message I
could reach out for help brainstorming ideas.
I believe having specific pages
on the book about the topic being discussed would help me a lot with the
problem of not knowing how to start/apply it to my experiences since there are
just 2 or 3 RSO experiences that I can try to relate them with. Although we are
free to pick a different topic, I believe I am afraid to try to steer away from
the prompt, but this is something I can try to work on the second half of the
semester.
A little bit about structure, for
me it is easier to divide my blog posts on topics, like I did with this one and
my previous one since it makes my posts more organized and it gives me questions
to answer in each section. I wonder if it is easier for the reader to follow
rather than having one long essay.
Future Blog Prompts
As I mentioned above, having a reference
to which pages of the book we are learning and discussing about has helped me a
lot with the pre-writing process and a good idea would be to try to relate
some of the topics to world news/happenings. I found it very helpful the
Fischer Body example, or the many example given in the B&D book of
successful companies that did not keep up with change and lost their business.
So maybe a future prompt could be
current examples of inefficient business who were able to turn themselves around
due to a structural change. How companies solved the upstream vs. downstream example,
whether it was through vertical integration or management, I believe it would
generate a good discussion on topics that we have been studying such as
producer surplus vs consumer surplus, social welfare and the role of the central
planner.
I can appreciate your comments about specific pages from the book, while still not wanting to do that all the time. It seems to me that students have a few vices in this regard. These include -
ReplyDelete(a) too much memorization and not enough processing of the information in a way it can be used outside of the context where it was presented,
(b) seeing individual ideas as things in themselves but not connected to other ideas of the course, and
(c) not putting in sufficient time so that (a) and (b) become more likely.
Put a different way - you can go to the index of the M&R and find the pages yourself. Doing that legwork might be a very good thing for you (and for your classmates too).
I gather that English is not your first language. I wonder if you think in English or not. I don't know if that matters for the pre-writing, but I can imagine that it might.
On the few occasions where we've chatted a little bit, you seem like a very enthusiastic student. But, sometimes the work is slow coming in. This post, for example, is late. I am not sure how to reconcile those two observations. I wonder if you can explain that so it makes sense to me.
A different issue, one I'm not sure matters in your case but I will mention it here in case it does matter, is procrastination. You might enjoy this piece, called Later, that discusses the matter. Incidentally, I procrastinate too. After commenting on your post and one other student who submitted around the same time, I have to start assigning points on blog posts for the first half of the course. I don't look forward to doing that. While I probably should get to it later this afternoon, more than likely I will do it tomorrow.
I like the way you lay out the difference aspects you are addressing in your blog post. It makes it very organized, and easy to follow through with you explanation. I have also noticed how descriptive your blog posts are. I also find it easy sometimes to refer back to concepts in my notes and textbooks when completing an assignment. I haven't been doing much of that with this blog post, but I probably should. Like you, I enjoyed reading B & D chapter 5 especially learning more about the structures of team and the type of team.
ReplyDeleteI have been doing a lot of brainstorming myself, but we can start brainstorming together as a group to help us get ideas flowing before writing the blog posts. Lastly, the upstream vs. downstream is a concept I am glad we are discussing in details in this class, as well as the game theory prisoner dilemma because I did not have any prior knowledge on this. I also think experimenting and relating concepts when following a prompt different from the one provided by prof. Arvan might be a great way to improve our writing skills.