Week 2: Cobwebs, Schedules, and Personalities

Preparation:
This week proved to be a good week to clean off the cobwebs of my learning and study habits.

The writing assignments for both economics and marketing we not too terribly labor intensive, but adding in all the reading requires looking for every opportunity in your schedule to read a few pages.  As with any group of five individuals thrown into a team, there are schedules and personalities.  For my learning team, we are working well together as a team.  Our biggest challenge will be our schedules.  Three of us travel with our work, so it will just be a matter of over-communicating our schedules to one another.

Reflections and Expectations:
I am quickly learning that one habit I need to change is to go to bed earlier and get up earlier as reading early morning is proving to be better for me with respect to comprehension and retention.   The combined reading and writing assignments are forcing me to be more disciplined with my schedule and plan out more.
As I am preparing to go over to the campus to meet with my learning team before class, I am excited to continue to get to know my team members as we learn how to best utilize each others strengths for the good of the team.  I am hoping that evening's classes will include lively discussion and debate as we clarify and validate what we've read this week.  Will be interesting to watch the group dynamics of the class as each learning team starts to form their individual group synergies.

Class Time:
I had met with some of the learning team earlier that afternoon, so we walked up to class just a few minutes before it started.  Room was extra warm tonight which made it a little difficult to concentrate.  The learning teams seemed a lot tighter tonight as we all seemed to stay in our little groups throughout the night instead of engaging others from the different teams.  Professor Warren had some people share their ad/article analysis that they had done for our weekly assignment.  Good discussion and always enlightening to see how others approach their assignments.  We learned more about the group and individual projects that will be due during the class and I'm officially in schedule mode.  This is going to take some sorting out and rearranging my schedule to squeeze in more time to work on this.
During Economics, Dr Estrada took the time tonight to take us all through a few of the basic concepts from Chapter 1&2 in response to our questions.  He provides many real world examples that help put the "book knowledge" in a different light.  Similar to the marketing class tonight, we also learned about our group project that will be due at the end of the semester.  This is really going to get busy!

Personal Thoughts:
Well.....2 weeks down and the work is starting to pile up.  I can't get too overwhelmed since I've not yet experienced the full load of work these projects are going to require.  Worrying about it at this point, will just waste brain cells and time.  Our learning team is quickly unifying and planning some time to meet this week to work on some economics problems that should hopefully help us all to feel more confident in the material.  I had recommended, and the team agreed, that we rotate an assigned leader for the team each week.  That person will be responsible for coordinating our meeting times, our project work, and basically managing us as a team for the week.  Each week a different person will assume that position giving each person multiple times to lead throughout this and next semester.  So, at week 2, I'm liking marketing much more than I thought and not disliking economics as much as I thought that I would. 
In case you want others' perspectives on this journey, the following are others that are currently blogging:
David Pfahler
Christine Herrera  
Amanda Keeter