John Hicks Econ 490 fall 2017 Blog

Filling your resume is assumed to be more and more important than before. Students are not only focused on getting a high GPA, but also trying to involve in organizations, having work and abroad experiences, and more. I believe that our current decisions as students are important for the future, however more roads lead to Rome. Thus, the decisions we make aren’t guarantees for a perfect job in the future. In my previous post about opportunism in the DJ scene, I’ve mentioned that I went to Cambridge because of my brother and dad. My father believes that taking a gap year after high school is an opportunity to live abroad, learn a language and to develop yourself. So after high school I went to Cambridge for 6 months and 2 months to California – Santa Barbara and San Diego - where I attended the language school Kaplan. I’ve achieved the Cambridge Advance Exam (CAE), made contacts all over the world and developed myself. This decision was also made with an eye toward the future, beca...

During the first half of this semester, I’ve written about my experiences of college life in Amsterdam and team structure in my soccer team back in The Netherlands. Furthermore, I’ve written about opportunism in the DJ scene in Cambridge and the Illlinibucks option at UIUC. Most of them were written because of a prompt, however I always try to give my own touch to my posts. I believe that all posts connect to each other in the area of organizations, but also do they overlap other than the prompts. First of all, I wrote about my college life in Amsterdam and I addressed here the case of exam trainings and transaction costs. A later post about opportunism reminds me that I could connect this with the exam trainings. I could act opportunism in this case, because I could have asked my money back after the training while the instructor already had spent his time on the training. Moreover, the structure posts can tie into the opportunism in the DJ scene post. As a DJ I was part of ...

As a new student to the UIUC I’m not really familiar with the things that are allocated to students on a first come first serve basis or on priority basis. However, I can still think about some things on campus where students could use Illinibucks, which would move the student to the head of the line. This would be registering for classes, dorm housing allocation and making an appointment in McKinley. I believe that Illinibucks would be most used for registering for classes if it would be introduced, mainly because certain classes are really high demanded. I got accepted to the university after the registering for the fall semester was opened, so when I had the chance to register for classes a lot of them were already full. If I could use Illinibucks I would spend them on the registering of classes, so that I could register for another course that I wanted to follow. Luckily ECON490 has a lot of options and that’s why I’m registered for four ECON490 classes. If this wasn’t the cas...

In one of my previous posts, I’ve written about my experiences with student organizations. However, it is hard to connect my student organization to a successful team, because, in my opinion, a successful team is often associated with performance and achieving goals. In a student organization the ‘president’ set goals, but it is difficult to measure its performance. So in this post I will introduce another experience with organizations, which has to do with my former soccer team. The soccer season 2013/2014 was one of the best sport years in my life. At this time I was a player of the under 19 men team at Kampong, which is a soccer club in Utrecht, The Netherlands. This was the first time that the under 19 team was playing in a fairly high level league. My soccer friends and me were all very hyped to play the season and the club gave our team all the opportunities to prepare as good as possible. On the last day of play we had to win the last match to win the league and we did. I b...