Mid-Term Week: Tests, Presentations, Pigeons?

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                Oh, this week. What’s there to say about this week? Insanity. It’s mid-terms week at Clark, vacation’s next week, and my stress level is at a high. Okay, a lot of the stress has gone down since yesterday. I had midterms in Personal Values and Managerial Communications. I think I did fairly well on both.

                For Personal Values, our exam was broken up into take-home and in-class portions. They were rather similar in nature. Both had several questions about major topics we had gone over in class. I guess the main difference between the two is the take-home could just be regurgitated information from your notes whereas the in-class has to be entirely from memory. The take-home portion was extremely helpful in preparation. If I had just studied on my own, I don’t know that I would have remembered the concepts as well as I did since I had to write about them.

                Managerial Communications was last night. I guess you can’t really call it a mid-term, but we had class presentations about our research topics. It was interesting how diverse everyone’s topics were from one another and how each student took a different approach to getting their data and analyzing it into one cohesive report. My project was most based on academic research. I talked about motivation for paid and volunteer workers. Data shows that workers are more motivated by the non-monetary rewards such as self-worth, knowledge, and team-building which go along with their work instead of just the pay check at the end of the week. Other classmates took a more case study approach. They looked closely at a specific organization and analyzed what they were doing well and what could be improved. My project incorporated that as well, but I need to do further research for my term paper.

                My “mid-term” in economics is on Friday. I put that in quotes because we don’t technically have a mid-term or final. We have four tests throughout the semester and one of them happens to fall during mid-terms week. The topic we’re working with is really interesting, but kind of hard to explain if you haven’t taken economics. We’re working with the numbers associated with revenue, cost, and profit and determining how much a supplier should make in order to make the most money. It’s kind of complicated to say here, so I’ll leave it up to you to look it up if you’re interested.

Skinner experimenting with a pigeon

                Thankfully, I do have a little bit of a rest in psychology. Funny. Psychology is helping to ease my psychological state of stress. Oh, I crack myself up. Anyway, we’re doing the usual routine in psychology right now. Lecture material yesterday was about learning and memory. The aspect which I found interesting is how easy it is to train an animal to adopt a given behavior for something as simple as a bit of food. We watched a video in class of a pigeon that learned to turn around counter-clockwise to get food. It doesn’t seem probable to train a pigeon, but it can be done. A psychologist named Skinner actually wanted to train pigeons to guide bombs. Creepy, right? I for one am very happy we don’t have pigeons working with our military…

                I’m hoping my economics test will go well tomorrow and then I’ll be off to a relaxing week of vacation. Imagine that – relaxing! That concept just blows me away. Have a fantastic week. I’ll write again after vacation. Thanks for reading!

If only packing for vacation meant getting a dog!