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

Launch Workshop - Jan 3, 2011

So begins my 2 year journey to an MBA at Concordia University in Austin, TX. This blog is an attempt to help me capture the events, process and hopefully personal growth through this two year journey.  I decided to do this as one of the members of the first Cohort had done the same thing and it really helped me by reading her blog.  Not that this will help anyone else, but at least it will facilitate my own gathering of thoughts each week.
The journey began this past Monday night, January 3rd, with the Cohort 2 Launch Workshop. It was facilitated by Dr. Ford. Upon arrival, there was a sense of apprehension AND excitement in the air. The room was arranged into five table groups, four people per table. Dr. Ford and Dr. Christian were both moving throughout the room sitting with different table groups to get to know us and break the ice.
Our homework due for that evening was to each bring in a one page situation brief that focuses on one aspect of the the assigned problem. The problem we were to address was that given the current global economy, what can we do to capture, cultivate and retain a talented workforce. We could try to address this at as high a level or low a level or our own choosing.
As we began sharing our situation briefs with our individual table groups, my table discovered that we had all essentially written similar situation briefs focusing on workplace fulfillment. Each table group took notes on one large paper to summarize the approach to this big ambiguous problem. The discussion was great and gave great insight into the thought processes of the members of the cohort and what to expect in this two year journey together. Once we discussed as our table group, two members of the group had to rotate to another table to learn what that group had come up with, share relevant information that we could add, and discover commonality in our approaches. Each table group's paper was put up on one of the walls and we spent 10-15 minutes going over all of them to look at varying approaches.
We spent the rest of the evening discussing various introspective questions with our table groups and then would share with the whole room as facilitated by Dr. Ford.

Personal thoughts:
I came into the evening wondering how easy or difficult this journey would be. I shared that evening that I am terrified, but very excited. I came away from the evening with the utmost respect for my peers as I got to observe their transparency, as well as their thought process. The humbling thought for the evening came to mind as I was listening.....I thought to myself, "I'm not the brightest bulb in the box". This is a room of diversity of education and work backgrounds, ideals, and thought processes, but it's a diversity that will serve to complement and unify us as a "little family". I'm proud to be a part of this group and excited to watch us all grow through this together. I hope I can still feel this way at the end of this semester :-)