Closing Another Chapter

It's that time again. The end of another semester as a college student. It's weird to think how fast time passes. COM320 has been a great experience for me. It's made me learn a lot about my own participation in groups as well as general information about how groups function. This is one of those classes that you know will be applied to several aspects of your life, throughout the rest of your life. I know that I will use the information gathered in this class for the short term (for example, next semester when I might possibly be working in a small group with a professor to collect research) and the long term (I want to work in Human Relations and it will be very likely that I will be working in small groups for projects or meetings).

I had my ups and downs with this class and the group as a whole, but overall I believe that I learned numerous valuable lessons. Thank you to Jasmine for conducting a fun, interesting, and productive semester.

So this is me signing off. Hope everyone enjoyed their experience in this class as much as I did. Good luck on finals, and have a good break.


Katie Spalding

Another reality check

So as many have pointed out, it's the last post of the semester. It's
also nearing the end of our time as groups, and nearing the end of the
semester. And for me, nearing the end to my second to last semester.

When you put all those things together the one that stands out is that
soon I'll be at my last semester at purdue. Scary thought. Up until
this point, it was just a different school to move on to. I feel this
will be the most significant change in my life for many years, and
I've known it was coming this entire time but I'm still not prepared
for it. And I feel that many people are in the same boat, especially
considering our economic situation.

So although this group will end, and this class will end, it is just
one of many things that will be ending to add up to saying "get the
heck out there and do something with your life," or as I would like it
to say "get the heck out there and make a difference." This time
there's no putting it off.

Signing off,
David Loverde

Ooohhhh man...the final week

This week coming up is essentially the final week for our group. We still have to finish our final presentation which will be given on Wednesday. Hopefully we can all get together tomorrow to work on the final presentation. Nothing new has happened since last week seeing that we have only had class once. Thanksgiving was good, hopefully it was for everyone else as well. Again though nothing has really been accomplished in terms of the final project, so there is a lot of work to be done. It really has seemed that time has really flown by. It seems like this final presentation along with other projects have really crept up on me and I'm sure on everyone else. It is really just hard to comprehend how we only have 3 more weeks of class left this semester.

Brandon

ah tis the time for the end of the semester...

So it's already that time of the semester where class work starts to pile on and everything seems like its due either this week or during dead week and in my case it stays true. But it's not so bad since it is almost Christmas break and then should hopefully be my final semester at Purdue pending on whether or not my senior design project passes this semester. Looking back at the semester, it seems that everything flew by even though at the time, I felt that time never passed and the end of the semester was never to come but being at this point of the year, I wish that it was still mid-semester so that I had more time to complete things thoroughly. On that list of completing things, I feel that our COM project could use more work on it before we present it this Wednesday but I'm sure that we will do fine and be able to give a good representation of how our service learning project went.

Chris Wall

The End is Near

Today is November 22nd. November. Already. I'm not quite sure where the time has gone, but yet another month in my senior year here at Purdue is almost at an end. There are so many emotions involved with this. Happiness. Sadness. Relief. Regret. It would make for an extremely long blog to list all the emotions that I'm feeling about my senior year and I doubt Jasmine would want to read that long of a blog.

I'm trying to take everything that happens this year moment-to-moment. So for this blog I am concentrating on the end of the service learning project/COM 320 as a whole. This class has been very interesting and has shown me a lot about myself, especially with how I work in groups. Now that it's the end of the semester I feel as if our group is more committed to the work at hand and in trying to get it done as soon as we can. This could be because the sooner we finish the project, the sooner we are done with class but that is beside the point. There were a few times this semester where we did not put as much effort into projects and assignments that we probably should have, but now I feel like we are exerting more than enough effort to finish this project. The project was fun, but I'm glad it's almost at an end. Assignments as time-consuming as this one has been are not my favorite thing in the world.

I am glad, however, that I have learned so much about myself and how I work in groups. I have learned that I am not very good at certain tasks while I am excellent at others. The group's feedback this past week helped with that. I have learned that I am too uptight with groups. I am disappointed when things do not go according to my plan and get a in a little over my head sometimes because I try to take on too much or expect too much. I have to give up some power to my other group members so the assignment at hand can end up better than if I was working by myself. What I am good at, however, are organizational tasks. I am good at taking notes and reminding group members of tasks that need to be accomplished as well as other things.

This semester has been interesting and more fun than I expected. And as the semester comes to an end, I am happy with my performance as well as my group's performance in the class.

Katie Spalding

Skipped a week...but not too much

The past two weeks have been somewhat laid back in class. We already conducted our creativity workshop the other week which went very well. The other groups had some good presentations as well, some were definitely better than others. Just this past week on the other hand we conducted leadership activities to define us as leaders. Not only did we find out our definitions but we also had to define our group members as well. Ironically two of group members were not present that day so the feedback that we received was less than stellar and not anonymous. We then conducted a few little activities where we all took turns reading questions off to the group and we had to all rate the person reading on that leadership trait that they read off. I don't think that this activity really did anything for me or anybody in my group. It really just got to be annoying having to read the questions and fill out all the papers for everyone. I understand the reasoning behind why we did this but don't feel it was necessary. We just started working on our final presentation outline for our service learning project. Tomorrow in class we intend to actually start working on the power point itself as well. Other than that nothing else has been going on in COM, other classes have been taking over. Will I graduate...the world may never know...


Brandon

Com news.

We are almost there! I can't believe thanksgiving is almost here and the semester is nearly over. It feels like it's been so long since we even did our service learning project and now we are to the final presentations for the class. It seems like we have passed the point of really learning new information in class, and are now just taking what we have learned/accomplished and showcasing it as this final project. Sitting in class on friday I was a little overwhelmed thinking about a presentation that would take the entire class period, but once the group started coming up with ideas and actually wrote some of the points down, I think it will be a quality report and don't think we will have any trouble meeting the time constraint.

Mitch Stamper