Monday, December 7, 2015

Review

As a whole, I enjoyed learning about the Economics of Organizations.  I thought the real world examples from the chapters were very interesting.  Reading examples of organizations that have been around for decades/centuries, how they have remained successful, and how their competition failed was really intriguing.  After having an internship this summer, I’ve become a lot more interested in the different techniques and theories behind managerial practices and how successful organizations are run.  Some of the book chapters taught me a good deal about this that I didn’t know going in to the course.

I also enjoyed the way the class was structured.  There was not an over heavy workload, and the balance between the Excel Homework and Blog Posts was great.   Writing about my own experiences concerning a topic before discussing it in class was a helpful exercise, in my opinion.  For me, preparation for blog posts and excel homeworks varied by week.  My goal would be to read the chapter concerning that week’s blog post/excel homework a day before it was due, and then work on the homework that day.  For excel homework, I would always watch the videos provided and take notes.  For some blog posts, there were immediate examples that came to mind, which made writing a lot easier.  Others, I would have to think and plan my writing, and this took a little longer (but usually not more than two hours).   The same goes for excel homework.  Some only took me an hour; the harder ones took a few. 

I thought the Final Project was also a good assignment.  Letting us pick an article related to any topic from class was great, it allowed us to look through multiple articles and choose the most interesting.   Reading an article on an interesting topic made it easier to understand and write about.  The liked the flexibility in the length of the paper as well.  I also appreciated that there were two options to choose from in terms of what to for the final project.  Finding a scholarly paper was a little difficult at first, but I’m glad I’ve had the experience searching for one, as not many classes require this.  As said in class, we don’t cover the topics in the class in great detail. Using this project as a way to learn more about a topic was interesting and a good exercise. 


That being said, it did feel like we jumped around quite a bit.  I would’ve liked to learn more about some of the topics presented in the class, but touching on them was definitely helpful.  I feel like I have a good base of knowledge for if I’d like to learn more about some of these subjects.