Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Final Evaluation

Overall I had a very good experience with my applied study. The fact the MSS is an ASU entity made it diverse in the teachers because I learned about school from a business standpoint as well as learning various things about college itself. I learned a great bit about how to successfully run an organization from the class sessions, I learned a lot about leadership, and got to do hands on work with the MSS running the Graduate Symposium and the Undergraduate Organizational Fair.
Some of the lessons that I learned about where about being prompt with work when you are in a certain position because there are so many different due dates and people involved that procrastination is for sure failure and pre-planning, is not even good, it is required.
Organizationally, I found the value of not selling out your organizational members for not holding up their portion of the work. Not saying that not getting work done is good, but sometimes to get the most out of a co worker, you have to encourage them first even when they fail the first time. Also, using an individual’s talents will make that person take more of an ownership of the organization and get things done. So if there is highly artistic person as the treasurer, that person might now do a great job but, even if that person were still the treasurer, but was also the organizations flyer designer, that persons likeliness to do the treasurer job as well as the flyer. Another good lesson that I want to keep with me is that a good leader comes to an agreement with their work and the leader’s vision. For example, we had a panel discussion and one of the offices mentioned that they were out in the community doing service building up one specific deprived community in phoenix. Then they changed that because Dr. Crow became president and he had a different mission and goal than the old president of ASU. I asked if she felt that his new mission was detrimental to their work in the community and then she explained that her and the members in her office read his mission statement and made a proposal to change the program to fit within his vision. So, now the program extended to communities in each more major Arizona cities in conjunction with UofA and NAU, to fit in with Dr. Crow’s vision of spreading ASU across the state and becoming larger. So they took the initiative and made a proposal for how they will operate in the future, instead of waiting for him to be able to come in and TELL them what to do.
I also learned a lot from the research that I had to do for my presentation. My topic was to minority leadership development programs at higher learning institutions. While I was looking up the programs, I finally decided that I would let my research flow more freely because there is no point in limiting the research to programs that solely are dedicated to minorities, when there is a good likelihood that it was found by research of another program anyway. So a minority program could have been copied from another leadership program and vice versa, the main point is to take the positive from the successful programs and find factors that would support or deny that from working for diverse cultures.
Even the assignment that had us to use one theory or concept and apply it to solve a problem at our site, I learned that those tools actually could be applied in a meaningful way by using the reward valence theory. It also made me wonder what different explanation I would have come up with if I used a different theory.
Not to go on too long, I think that this was a very valuable experience to my personal growth and I am glad that I got to do this internship before graduating. I didn’t sweep any floor or answer any phones, or other things that I could have done at Burger King, but gained insights that will affect me directly and immediately after graduation.