And the budgets are... balanced!

Last night was the big night for presentations in Critical Thinking! It seems that each class has a group project defined in the syllabus, and so for Critical Thinking we had a 20 minute presentation with 10 minutes of Q&A on balancing the Federal Budget.

As I've mentioned before, our 20 person cohort is divided into 5 teams of four people. My team is number 1! Literally. So being numbered 1, we had the opportunity to kick off the night of presentations by going first. I recently took a course from iSpeak on Presenting 4 Success, and so this was my first time to present to the class with some new skills. Generally teams start by a greeting, and introduce our team members, however using the information I gained, I immediately connected with the audience using a picture and a personal story of when I had worked with the State Department and tied that into federal spending. Its amazing to see the differences within the groups. One group was highly visual offering several representations in tangible ways to explain the concepts they covered. Another used technology most effectively with a killer PowerPoint. I feel that our group's strength was something you don't usually attempt when putting on a presentation, but I felt we were highly relational. I know we had great facts, but through use of personal examples, we were really able to connect with the audience, so much so that time had to be called on our Q&A, or we would have kept right on going. I know there is room I can grow to utilize power point to greater levels or have engaging props, but I just wanted to share how proud I am of my group in our ability to reach out and connect with our audience. We'll find out next week how we scored, and our big papers are due.

These past 2 weeks have been a mad blur. This week I haven't gotten to bed before midnight, and I am up at work by 7:30 each day. Tuesdays, with class, are generally 15 hour days. This week will be focused on writing and incredible paper, wrapping up equations for Accounting, and then the next week will be our cumulative final in Accounting. That means a mad push for 2 more weeks, but the finish line is in sight! An MBA can be hard work, but I am already astounded by the personal growth I've seen. I'll try to give you a glimpse in the summary of this semester after the additional 5 weeks of the next class we will take on- Organizational Behavior and Change.