Team Structures

I have been swimming for most of my life starting from the age of five until now. I have always enjoyed the competitive nature of the sport and the idea that what you put into it is what you get out. When I was in high school is when I started to participate more in the competitions and going to state meets and even making it as far as nationals. Before I came to high school the swimming team there was never more than average and never amounted to much. But my freshman year in high school we got a new coach, who has actually been my swimming coach fro the past 5 years prior to me coming to the high school and with him we started a team from scratch. Most of my teammates were actually people that I have been swimming with since I was seven years old so we all knew each other pretty well and the coach knew exactly everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. Going off of this we were also able to retain some of the old swimmers from years past that had potential and recruit new people that were willing to put in the work.

It was quite a transition period for our swimming team and mediocrity was not accepted anymore. The coach had twenty years of experience and he led the team with an iron fist. This idea of hierarchy quickly resonated throughout the team and if you didn’t listen to the coach then you would either not participate in the meets or you would be cut from the team. The coach was at the top of the hierarchy and the people that have been swimming with the coach for years prior to that were the higher-ups. We knew the system and we knew what it took to be successful. The coach quickly implemented practice schedules which would happen twice a day; once in the morning from five AM to seven fifty AM and the other would be from three thirty PM until six PM. These intense practices were new to me too and many people dropped the team during the first week. Many stayed though because the coach also brought in four assistant coaches who would take the time to focus on each swimmer individually in order to either develop their stroke or to give them specific workouts in order for them to catch up to the best swimmer on the team.

Our coach wanted us to become more ‘selfish’ in order to increase the productivity and the motivation for everyone to be successful on the team. This however didn’t mean no teamwork between the teammates but by us being selfish and wanting to win meant that practices would be taken more seriously and a good practice would be rewarded greatly. The coach from day one made it clear that in order to survive on the team we must fight for it and nothing will be given for granted. To this day I still consider this basic principle in my day to day life and like the article When a Child Thinks Life Is Unfair everyone expects to live a fair life but that is not possible in day to day so we must acknowledge that and use the given strategies in order to make everything more fair. One strategy that we used on our team was the auction where everyone got the choice to choose what event they wanted to swim at least once. Our coach knew what events everyone should be swimming in because of the strengths he believed everyone had but regardless of that he wanted everyone to get to choose an event that they believed they would do good and if you would prove him wrong then you would get a chance to stick with that event for the remainder of the season. Some of the events included different styles of swimming and different lengths that one would swim for.

All in all, the way my coach tended to the team included strict rules and strict practices where you had to give it your all in order to still be on the team. He gave us choices throughout the year and provided the right motivation and staff in order for us to excel. Some of the lessons such as being more selfish when it comes to your results are still things I use to this day.

Escaping Income Risks

I would like to start off saying that I invested money and my time into getting a degree from the university of Illinois. By doing this I strive to get a better education in order to get a good job when I get out of college with a good salary in order to pay off my debts and start investing the money I make into my future and my family’s future. Currently I am involved in multiple clubs on campus that require a form of payment per semester but guarantee to look good on any resume. One of them is the finance club where we have to pay $20 in order to be in it (the money is usually used to find speakers to come and talk to us about different jobs or opportunities in life. I am also and executive on CRFB (Central Residence Funding Board) where we allocate money to different organizations on campus that want the money in order to take students to field trips or organize themselves an event on campus that is strictly for residence students. I am currently double majored in economics and computer science because this is the route that I see giving me the best opportunities in life and it will help me build a long lasting career in any industry that I want. I hope that with these majors in combination with all of the clubs that I am part of it will truly help find my place in life and workplace.

I do not have any other siblings so I am not able to see which route they decided to take and if it was worth in the end. The closest that I have is a family friend who finished at Northwestern and decided one summer to take an internship in downtown Chicago. He said that even though he would work close to 12 hours a day for no much pay he was able to learn a lot of things in which he can use to his advantage for the current job that he has. He gave me some advice and suggested that when it comes time for me to apply for internships I should really not look at the amount of money that they pay us but at the potential experience that you can gain from doing this internship. Even though he in finance he took a job that dealt with both the financial side of everything but also had an engineering aspect to things. This way he was able to really get a different look at things and how they work. When I choose an internship I will surely want to make sure that this internship not only is in what I want to do for the rest of my life but it should also help me see things different which based on my friend’s internship is a secret weapon that will put you over others in a job.

All of the decisions from me deciding to go to college to me joining different clubs at different prices are all done for the sole reason to get a good job and be financially stable once I am out of college. Although I didn’t make a bank loan to pay for my college I did make a loan from my parents so I don’t have to pay high interest rates but nonetheless one day I will still need to pay them back for all of the money they paid for my education.

Course Reflection

When I was going through my past blogs I saw a patter happening. In the beginning I used to just strictly answer the prompt but I didn’t really give any further information that might show how I used the concept in real life or to better understand the material. But as the course moved on and with more and more blogs being posted I finally started to realize that the prompts were not just busy work but it was to help tie what we talk about in class together. It was really interesting to see this development and how my blogs got better and better because I was using this newfound ‘skill’. By realizing this I also see that all the themes were in some way related to each other in the economic sense. For example, the one about the time where we were a part of a team and the one where we or someone we know had to be opportunistic.

I think that the best way to connect to the themes is to connect the prompt to your life and try to answer it based on things that have happened to you personally. For example, when I started I didn’t connect to the prompt questions to my life story instead I was just trying to find a quick answer and get it over with. Now when I first start working on the blogs I try to think if there is something from my past that can answer the prompt and through that it makes it easier for me to connect all of them together and remember what I wrote about when class time comes about.

My process has definitely evolved in the sense that I try to write as much as I can and even though sometimes it is hard to think of answers to the prompt and fulfill the total amount of words necessary I started to enjoy the process. In the beginning I would kind of give up when I got stuck and leave it until later whereas now I try to get it done from one try and if I get stuck it makes it in a way more fun for me to try to decipher my thought process while still providing a good answer.

For future prompts I would like to see more open blogs where we are allowed to write about different ideas such as the Illini bucks. I think that those prompts make it more worthwhile to write about because more often than not the things I write about is about things that I would like to see get done either for myself or for my future. But I would like to see at least one topic where it is more specific and where we would be given a problem to analyze. For example, if we have an excel problem about some business or economy and based on the numbers we look at we would have to write about whether that business is doing good from an economic standpoint and give advice to the owner of the business or something similar. I would like to see that because I would get a better feeling about economics and how it ties to everything around me. Both of these sound fun and yet challenging and it would make it more interesting to read someone else’s blog and see what they thought to do in comparison to your beliefs.