My favorite and most interesting topic was Insights Ethics.
First, it allowed me to understand what types of privacy practices take place
in today’s marketplace, as well as the role that I should take on as a future
marketer in the field. I did not know about the cookies that websites attach to
your computer and I also did not know about how some mannequins now have
cameras to watch consumers. This helped me to be more careful on my practices
as I surf the internet. I now restrict access to many websites that try to
access my computer or phone and also went back and changed my settings. Furthermore,
as I now enter the “real world” and will soon start working in marketing, This
made me conscious of the practices that I will take once I am there. It made me
realize that I will do my best to better cater to the needs of my consumers but
that in order to gain their trust I must be transparent in my practices and how
they learn about them.
One skill that I believe this class helped me learn was how
to better work in teams. There were times where I felt like my ideas should be
chosen but when I allowed the entire team to work together and create ideas as
a whole, our deliverable was ten times better. For example, during our prototype
creation in class, I decided to design one toy while the rest of the group
worked on another. At the end of class, their end product was way better than
mine. This helped me understand that we were in groups for a reason and that
five brains put together can create bigger and better things than just one.
Moreover, I learned to sympathize with the rest of the group and understand the
responsibilities and activities each one of us had. Nicole had to work at
times, Rasmus is an international student and wanted to travel during the
weekends, Chizoba had a busy recruiting semester, Trey had other group
projects, and I was recruiting and traveling at times. This helped to be more
sympathetic of others, to better work around other people’s schedules, and to
sometimes compromise. We each accomplished what we needed to do and were
understanding when others had something come up. This helped us worked better
as a group, to remain calm, and to work hard.
I feel like every phase of the project was useful because it
helped us to have direction for the final deliverable of our project. I would
say I would have liked the prototype creation time to have been longer. For the
first deliverable, we had about two weeks and for our research we had almost
three weeks. When it was time to create the prototype, due to meeting
scheduling conflicts, we only had two days. It was hard to come up with an idea
from scratch and carry it out. We each had a different ideas for where to take
our project and it was somewhat difficult to agree on one. Also, I believe that
we could have been more creative with our project but since there was not much
direction on our final prototype we failed to think beyond creating an app. I
would suggest that for future projects Professor Walls would provide examples
of what has been done in the past. I feel like it would give students a better
sense of what is expected without limiting their levels of innovation.
I would say that this was probably the most confusing
project that I have ever done. In most of my classes I have been given more
guidance on what is expected or what the task of the project was. I felt like
there were several instances where I asked a question and the answer given to
me left me more confused than before. Since most of the people in my group were
lost, we tried to make sense of the deliverable as much as possible but were
never a 100% sure. This led to low contribution because none of us knew exactly
what we had to do. I was appreciative of
the group that I got to work with because it was very diverse; there were
students from different nationalities that brought different experiences and
knowledge to our project. Every time we worked together we learned something
new from each other such as spelling words or our career paths after college.
Regardless of the confusion, working on this project was a
great experience. I believe there are few classes in the business school that
allow you to think that you can create anything that comes to your mind, that
it is okay to mess up, and to learn from your mistakes if you do make one. This
class did that for me it allowed my creative side to come out and it helped me
understand that business and creativity is the innovation that will succeed in
the future.
