Econ 490 Fall Alan Krueger

In late October 2016, I was hired on by University Housing to become a Residential Advisor (RA), to replace someone who had been removed from the position around a month prior. To briefly explain the organizational structure of Housing staff, an individual RA works with a staff of around ten other RAs, in my case eleven, a ‘Multicultural Advocate’ (MA), under a direct supervisor, the Resident Director (RD), who reports to further levels of upper management. The staff of each hall arrive up to three weeks before the academic year officially starts to undergo training and in the process do a lot of team building exercises. As a result of being the only people on campus at the time, most staffs grow relatively close with one another and, as is stated in Boleman and Deal chapter eight, work out an organizational hierarchy that is right for them. People who are content to lead, lead, those who wish to fade into the background, fade. As a mid-semester hire (which is very rare, most re...

This week’s prompt asks us to delve into three readings in order to apply them to a team setting with gift exchange. While I typically like to structure my posts before I write them, this prompt has me wanting to do the opposite; so fair warning, this one may come out as a more stream-of-consciousness than normal. The team that I’ve been a part of that’s most fresh in my head is the cast and crew of the most recent theatrical production I was a part of. I served as the director of the show, and I’m somewhat trepidatious to use it as an example as a fellow classmate was a member of the production, but the recency should allow for specificity, which I will try to use to my advantage. The first of these articles I read was the one on using game theory with children. Now, at the risk of offense, I compare this to my own recent experience, with the caveat of course that adults are not children. However, as I’m beginning to realize, some do like to act like them. For those unfamiliar...

I often describe myself as a very risk-averse person, and my college life has been an example of that. From a practical standpoint, I think attending a university to gain knowledge is functionally useless; the whole of human knowledge is available online in my pocket at my demand. I also tend to shy away from the necessitation of most accreditations, since I tend to lump most of them into the fallacy of argument from authority. When I describe why I’m on this campus, I almost always use the phrase “I’m here to buy a degree.” Barring the small likelihood of failing out, you achieve the requisite accreditation via an investment of four years and thousands of dollars. It’s a buy-in similar enough in my mind to the medallion system that taxi drivers have. However, the fact of the matter is, in this country at this time, a baccalaureate is required for good job placement, and the risk-averse person wants a steady job. Getting a degree, thought, requires such lofty financial commitment ...

Halfway through the semester is a good point to stop and evaluate blogging as an exercise, as well as a meta-analysis of the themes of my own posts. I added the class a week into the semester due to some problems with scheduling, and so I believe I missed some of the opening discussion on what a blog post should entail. The first substantive one that I wrote was on my own experience with organizations, which I was told via comment was too across the board: shallow analysis of a few different organizations, rather than a treatise on one. To some extent, I think that’s a little unfair of an analysis, I had experience at many organizations and I felt by reading the prompt that week it would be best to share things from many angles. Organizations are full of different people doing different tasks, and I felt that offering perspective from a few different sources would be a beneficial assessment. The next week; however, the prompt was perhaps unclear to me, or perhaps less interestin...

Through my teenage years I gained most of my knowledge of teams from my Boy Scout troop, where I had been involved in every level of the organization. To break down the basic workings of troop activities, the general flow is something like this: scouts in the eighth grade or younger comprise most of the members of the troop and are grouped into patrols of same-aged scouts that range in size from six to fifteen, give or take, depending on the amount of same aged kids. Upon entering high school, the scouts that still remained in the troop (most tend to drop out shortly into high school, as other time commitments pop up) were given a green shirt (instead of the usual tan), the patrol was disbanded outside of formal organizational purposes, and scouts were assigned a younger patrol to work with. Among these “senior” scouts, one was elected to be the Junior Assistant Scoutmaster (or JASM), whose job it was to run meetings, coordinate the other senior scouts, and report back up to the a...