Spring Has Sprung: Beginning Wrap Up the Year

                I’m relieved to tell you that spring has finally sprung here at Clark University. The sun’s shining, flowers are being planted around campus, and The Green is actually green. It’s wonderful. The only down side is that finals are approaching which means a lot more studying – most of which, unfortunately, is done indoors. Yes, there are people who read outside, but for writing papers, inside is really the best place.

                Anyway, the paper I’m working on is for managerial communications. I’m sure I’ve stated this in almost every entry, but my paper is discussing the differences in motivation between paid and volunteer workers. What I’m finding is that pay really doesn’t have very much influence in motivating workers to reach their potential. It will get them out of bed to get to work every day, but if someone doesn’t have other motivators, they will put in the minimal effort to get their paycheck at the end of the week. Along with the paper, I will be giving a PowerPoint present to the class which will discuss the same things. The difference is that I am choosing what kind of audience I want to address and adjust my presentation accordingly. I am going to be speaking to managers of both volunteer and paid workers since I have found that my research is equally applicable to both groups of workers.

                In economics, we’re beginning to touch on macroeconomics. Literally, we’ve just started, so I don’t have too much information I can tell you about the topic. For the majority of this semester, we have been focusing on microeconomics, but because this is an introductory course, it’s important that both major divisions of economics are covered. What we are starting to talk about is GDP and how that changes from year to year. There are factors that make data less clear such as inflation and right now we are learning about how to measure GDP on the same scale for each year. I apologize for being vague, but truthfully, I don’t know enough right now to go into further detail.

                Psychology is focusing on the development of children. It’s really cool. We’ve learned about the development from the joining of egg and sperm to birth and now we’re discussing the rate at which babies learn different things. One element studied is conservation. That means if we have two of the same size glasses filled with the same amount of liquid, if one glass is emptied into another shape glass, do we know that the amount of liquid has remained constant? Yes. We know that. However, this skill takes time for children to develop. Their intuition tells them that a taller glass must hold more liquid because the level of liquid is higher. There are lots of other examples of tasks which children are tested on, but I particularly liked that example.

                Course registration has come and gone and I got into all of the classes I mentioned last week! It’s such a relief when you’re worried about classes filling up, you send in your request, and then the web page says you have successfully registered for the class. It eliminates so many stresses. Well, I’m looking forward to getting out and enjoying this beautiful weather. I hope you have the chance to do the same and have a great week. Thanks for reading.