Final Post

This class was formatted in a way in which I have never experienced a class.  I came into this class with very few expectations.  I knew that when I was signing up for classes that I wanted to take a few 400 level economics courses to fulfill my major requirements.  I ended up learning more real world material in this class than I could have pictured from the start.  The way we learn in this class is basically designed for us to question everything being said. 

At the beginning, my blog posts were very vague.  You kept bringing up a point about how I needed to dig deeper into my ideas to come up with new ideas.  As I began to understand what you really meant by this, I really started to see how I needed to start to expand my thoughts because that is the only real way in which I am able to come up with new ideas that have relevance. 

The biggest takeaway from this class are the ways in which you can be a successful leader.  Ideally, I would love to be a leader at whatever job I end up choosing after I graduate.  I know I will not be in a leadership role right away but maybe eventually.  There are many types of effective leaders.  You can lead by example, or you can lead by explaining every little detail about what is going on.  I can see myself being a combination of those two types of leaders.  I find it easy to communicate my thoughts to people verbally.  I also have always been a visual teacher/learner.  I feel as though it is hard to really understand something until you see it happening.  A perfect example for this is football.  I can explain anything that is going on to anybody, but until I actually physically show that person exactly what I am trying to explain to them. 

Blog posts were a great way to express my thoughts in my own way.  The best part about the blog posts are that I was in total control of them.  I was able to let the ideas stem off of whatever I wanted.  If I wanted to tell a story I told a story.  If I wanted to simply express and explain many facts, that is exactly what I did.  The sooner future students realize that they can conduct their blog posts however they want; they will find it a lot easier to create better blog posts every week. 

The excel homework is a very good way to see where you are in the course.  There are times in which the homework can be difficult, but if you take your time and follow all of the instructions, you will find that the homework does not take too much time.  I would say that the blog post takes about 30 minutes and the excel homework can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour.  This is a very reasonable amount of homework per week for the class.  The homework is definitely not time consuming, but it makes you think a lot which is better in my opinion.

I really did enjoy this class, but there were a few things that I wish we could have had but we did not.  There were times in which I found myself lost during the course.  That is mostly my fault, but in a way I wish there was a weekly checkpoint review in which we were asked specific questions based on that week’s material.  The excel homework is usually more numerical based.  Sometimes I need a little bit more analysis to really understand the concepts.  I feel as though me and many other students are able to plug in numbers on excel and we eventually would figure out the work.  I was able to retrace my steps and always understand it, but I would have loved to have just known how to do all of the problems on the first try. 

Last words of advice to any incoming students.  This course is not going to be an easy course.  The workload is not crazy, but the concepts are not going to be easy to understand.  If you are not willing to put in the necessary time, you will find yourself struggling.  The information learned in this course is practical and will help you throughout the rest of your life.