Blog Post Due 12/2 Final Reflection

As a whole, I loved this course. It was one of the few courses I enjoyed attending. Although attendance was optional, I still enjoyed going every day because I knew the professor was knowledgeable about the topic and came prepared every day with interesting course material.

The biggest lesson I learned about organizations now that the class is in regards to my project. My project was about the effort to reduce shirking in the workplace through shared capitalism. Specifically what I found most interesting was how giving equity in a company creates a more efficient and productive working environment. Although it makes sense that if you were rewarded with company equity or other forms of shared capitalism, you would want to work harder yourself, however I did not see the positive externality of co monitoring coming into play. Almost every form of shared capitalism created an environment where employees were more likely to correct shirking behavior of others, or at least report it to the proper higher-ups to deal with it. That is not something I expected.

I also enjoyed the way the class was taught. My main problem in Econ classes was that I lose focus when the teacher explains a long complicated topic. Its not that I don’t want to focus, I obviously would love to learn whatever is going to be on our tests, however, when a teacher is monotonously droning on about a topic that isn’t very relatable to me, it is hard to stay 100% there. In your class, you constantly connected the topics to everyday examples that were related to us. Most memorably, when you compared different types of beer to reputation of goods. It put the lesson in an example that all of us could understand, even if we don’t drink beer. I also liked how we did the discussion posts before class. Although I did not get the feeling until after the first midterm, I thoroughly enjoyed conversing about a topic we were going to learn in class as opposed to reading about it. Personally, I learn best through interaction and not through reading something out of a book, so although I did not understand till late, it was a huge help for the second half of the class.

As I started doing the blogs, I got into a pretty good pattern or my thought process. Typically, the prompts was very easily relatable to my experience with the Evans Scholarship, which was a huge help because the scholarship is an economic organization and my experience with it almost always translated to the prompt. After I figured out what I was going to write about, I googled or looked up in the book any words or concepts that I did not fully understand and wrote the post. The homework was a little bit easier and more straightforward. I had a friend in the class so we would both start the homework with the intent on finishing it on our own. If we ran into any problems, we would text or call each other and work the problem out together.

Something I would have liked to see in the course would have been collusion between economic organizations and governments. Something I was interested in learning about more since the New York Times article we had to read was the part about how big business and big government worked together to get what they wanted. I feel that would have been interesting to see the darker side of government and big business.