The End of A Semester

This semester is almost coming to an end at our college. And because of that our professor would love to receive some feedback on a very important part of our class which is...this blog. I loved the fact that we had to blog. I might have been late on my part of it but that had mainly to do with me. I was on time when it came to reading other peoples opinions because I find learning from others as a very enjoyable experience. People can teach you in ways that you would have never thought possible and our professor did just that by assigning us to keep this blog. I will hopefully keep blogging in the future but I believe that being as lazy as I am it wont last very long. But I have learned alot by blogging. And the professor should keep this blogging assignment for future classes. I am sad that this class is going to be over soon but at every end there is always a new beginning.

Is that really me?

I had never done an evaluation like DISC before and it turned out to be a pretty good experience. It analyzed me as being an I/C. I agree with this evaluation. During the evaluation there was just a 1 point difference between C and D. And when I told my friends in the class that I was an I/C they said I seemed more like a D. But in any case, I believe that there is no point in trying to figure out which one of these you are because people have all of these characteristics in them anyway. During different situations people call upon different characteristics to cope with the situation. As long as people use what they have to their best it doesn't matter what category they fall into.

A vision for the future

There are many things that I want to accomplish, starting my own company, having a family, and many other things that other people would want to do in the future as well. But there are some goals that I really want to get done if not now then in the future.

1) Getting my own apartment
2)Getting a real estate and insurance licenses
3)Getting a job

Each of these things are something that I either want to do or will have to do. But getting them done is the hard part. The first of these is getting my own apartment. That is one of the easier of my goals that I have been working on. I have been looking in newspapers and online to find an affordable place for myself and will hopefully find one. The second of my goals is a bit more difficult. Getting a real estate and insurance license is something I want to do just because I feel it could be helpful for me to fulfill my third goal which is to get a job. The real estate license is something I dont know if I will use in the future but I think it would give me alot more knowledge. The insurance license is something that I might use in the future but i just dont know. Getting a good job is a very hard thing to do in the current economic situation. And there really is no such thing as job security. So im hoping that with the licenses I can do something on the side while having a job as well. Hopefully I can accomplish all of this soon.

After test chaos

We had just gotten our tests back and found out the results of our examination, and what does the professor do? He uses this opportunity to teach us a lesson on management. Making a decision when it comes to certain things is hard, but making that decision after receiving your first exam back makes making a decision much harder. Besides the shock of having our tests given back to us and the shock of this group assignment another way the professor decided to mess with us was that we had to vote 100% on the changes that we want made on our test format, extra credit on the test, and review format. Getting 100% vote is one of the hardest things to do without the other conditions that I had mentioned but somehow we managed to do it.
The decision making exercise showed what people would do under a decision making situation with a large group of people. What I did was discuss some solution and some different changes to make with the people around me. But since there was no real leader to guide the class to their goal nothing was happening. After a little bit, a guy named Teddy went up and started delegating to the group. This made things a lot better, he got a lot of different ideas on the board and we voted on what we wanted. With his role as the leader our entire class was able to get a curve, extra credit and a lot of different benefits that we would have never gotten if the chaos that happened earlier stayed. It was a nerve wrecking group assignment and the professor was smart to do it like that because I learned a lot.

A new Egg-venture

The egg drop activity was extremely fun. But it was extremely difficult to plan everything out without having any of the materials. My group went through the first 3 steps of the planning process but when it came time to decide on a final decision people were still split on several different ideas. We skipped step 4 and went straight into step 5 because of our time limitations we really could not afford to delegate tasks to several people. But once we got the materials and made our egg holding device, we felt that there was no way that the egg could possibly be safe. Even though we felt like that we went for it and somehow our egg came out perfectly fine. Everyone in our group felt that we got super lucky. We could have been more effective if our group had only decided on a final egg holder before we got our hands on the materials. But we could not have hoped for a better outcome and we were lucky enough to receive 5 points extra credit!

An ode to management

To love something so much that they can create something new
is something that no one else but our professor can do
to turn a subject like management into this
is one of the blindest risks

how our professor did this is still a mystery to me
but in the future we all shall see
how much we truly learned from this
class that was full of risks

Do you really want to order that?

I haven’t been to a McDonald’s in the longest time. But a few days ago I went with my friend for this extra credit assignment. I went to the McDonald’s located on 33rd street and 7th avenue at about 10pm. I went in and immediately felt that I was going to get a lot of different looks from the staff working there. I assumed that this McDonald’s would be very understanding of my crazy special order because of all the tourists that comes by. And I started to look around for the person I would give my order to. I wanted someone that would not give me a look like I was crazy. But I felt that, that was not going to happen.
So I went up to the person at the register and said “Can I have a burger with 4 pickles and an order of small fries with no salt and well done.” He had the most confused look that I had seen in a long time. It looked like he was thinking “This guy is messing with me right?” I saw him push the extra pickle button four times and when I told him about the fries he told me that I had to wait 4 minutes for them and I agreed. When he gave me the receipt it said 1 burger with 1 extra pickle and 1 small French fries. When I saw that I started to get worried because I didn’t want to tell him that he had to make the burger again if there were more or less pickles. I was hoping to get it done as fast as possible and get out of there without having the staff giving me looks.
After he took my order he turned around and told the staff my order. There was a team of about 7 or 8 people making burgers and fries and 3 people at the cash registers. There tasks were broken up in different divisions. And I tried to follow my burger being made but everything was going just so fast that I couldn’t tell which one is mine. I assumed that there would be one person back there that would have a confused look at my special order but they all just carried on like a normal day. I was also looking at the person that was giving and making fries at that moment and he didn’t seem like he cared at all. Since mine was an order of fries without salt it would make sense to him to just take some fries to the side after he makes the new batch and not put salt in them.
I received my order in about 5 minutes. And these 5 minutes I spent hoping that the staff got the order right. When I got the special order the guy gave it to me and just had a look of relief that I am going to be leaving. I opened up the burger and was happy to see that there were exactly four pickles. Then I tasted the French fries and it turned out that they didn’t have salt and they were well done.
The overall experience I would rate as 4 out of 5. The staff worked fast and without any problems, so I give them 4.5 out of 5. They communicated well between each other because they got the order right on the first time so I would give that 4 out of 5. The customer service I would rate as 3 out of 5 only because of all the awkward looks that they were giving me. I know that it is unfair for me to judge them on their reaction to my crazy order but I think that they should have still been more professional about it. When you’re in that industry, you should expect people to make crazy orders. And if I were to help them improve I would tell them to give better customer service. Even if you get a customers order wrong if you are friendly to them they will be more understanding and they will be willing to wait. A little bit of friendly customer service can go a very long way.