I don’t know what to do with New England weather. It’s the last day of March and we’re expecting snow this weekend! I’m hoping that it will be just barely warm enough that it will be rain instead. Yes, I do have a reason for bringing up the weather. It is in fact something I’d like to talk about, but it also serves as a nice segue into discussing my classes.
In Economics yesterday, we started watching “An Inconvenient Truth.” Just as a quick recap, it’s a documentary made by Al Gore concerning global warming. My professor is an environmental economist and she wants us to watch this documentary through the lens of an economist. What exactly does that mean? Well, we’ve recently been discussing market failures and how the government can intervene to make the prices “right.”A market failure is simply when the market outcome is not “best” for society. Yes, it’s very vague, I know. Econ 011, a course I plan to take in the fall, goes into much more detail about what exactly makes a market outcome a market failure. Anyway, when looking at global warming, we can analyze the costs and benefits of not only things done to clean up the environment, but also the firms which are polluting our atmosphere. A firm with pollutants has negative externalities, which causes the price of their product to go down. This makes sense because if people know that a company is doing bad things to the environment, it will have less demand and will have to reduce its prices. We will finish watching the documentary tomorrow. I’m looking forward to what new connections I can draw from my knowledge of economics.
Yesterday, I also had an exam in psychology. The material was pretty expansive, covering everything from language to intelligence to aggression. It’s really interesting to see the ways that our biology and our environment play specific roles in shaping how we develop. For example, we all have a basic ability to learn a language, but whether or not we can speak has a lot to do with our environment. In an extreme case, there was a young girl named Genie who was terribly abused by her parents for several years. She did not have the opportunity to learn language until she was a teenager and at that point, despite her efforts, she was unable to fluently speak a language. This is because there is a “sensitive period” of time in which we must learn our first language if we are to be able to at all. Of course, there are many other examples of how our environment supplements our biology which can affect things such as how aggressive we are, our IQ scores, and so on. I’m currently trying to decide what psychology class to take next semester, and I have no idea what to do. There are too many choices and they all seem really fascinating.
In managerial communications, we continued our unit on crisis communication. To do this, our professor provided us with a hypothetical scenario of a CEO of a company who was caught in an affair with a young intern. Our job was to act as a representative of the company and deliver a short speech which would clear the name of the company. Our speeches were videotaped and we watched them in class to give each other constructive feedback on presentation techniques such as posture, confidence, etc. Once we had each given our presentations, our professor explained to us that the best way to clear the company’s name was to just make the story insignificant. Just move forward and don’t even mention what went on with the CEO. I was surprised by this initially, but it makes sense for a company to stay out of the personal matters of their employees.
As I mentioned briefly, course selection is coming up. It’s rather difficult to determine what courses I’d like to take next semester because I am unsure if I’d like to major in economics, psychology, management, or double major in two of them. It’s also important that I fulfill perspective requirements. While this may seem unappealing, I only took economics because it was a perspective requirement and it turns out I really love it. Once I have a more finalized list of courses I’m interested in, I’ll talk about that process in more detail. Thanks for reading.
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