Diary of My Last Day at School (Year 1)
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Although I took my last final exam the week before, I considered my last day of school Monday, May 11, due to a final project I had to complete for the Carlson Brand Enterprise. The CBE allows students to apply knowledge from the classroom to develop solutions for real clients with a 7-week project.
My team scheduled a full day meeting on Monday to finish up our PowerPoint deck before our Tuesday morning client presentation.
Monday, May 11th
7:58 AM – arrive at the Carlson Brand Enterprise room for our 8:00 meeting. Ok fine - it was 8:05. The sign that greets me says it’s “where the fun is at,” which I don’t know if I’ll agree with today.
8:09 AM – first Keurig coffee brewed. I feel a pang of guilt that Keurig cups create so much waste, but justify it by telling myself I’m really good at recycling otherwise. On my way back to our workroom I see that there’s something important to read on the whiteboard, so I read it. It appears our classmate Eric looks like a cartoon character.
8:15 AM – after a quick debrief of everyone’s weekend, we write an agenda for our day. We have some work to do on our data analysis and recommendations but feel confident we can get everything done by 5. Anna is assigned to the task of getting our appendix slides “on fleek,” which Urban Dictionary tells me means “very good.”
9:16 AM – our fourth teammate, Prem, arrives from a supposed “dentist appointment.” We don’t know if we should believe him but his teeth do look clean. He reports no cavities.
Prem and Anna work on the data analysis portion of the presentation and Jaclyn and I work on the recommendations. I feel grateful to have such a solid team.
11:08 AM – the team is in need of a quick break, so we decide to listen to Taylor Swift’s latest release, Bad Blood. We debate about who the song is really about and settle on Katy Perry.
12:00 PM – the team regroups. Things are coming along well but a little bit slower than expected. If I’ve learned anything this past year in school it’s that PowerPoint decks always take longer than you think they will. Always.
3:58 PM – team has a lively debate about how a Likert Scale from 0 – 10 actually has 11 points, not 10 points because you need to include zero.
6:50 PM – after countless revisions, 9 cups of coffee (group-wide), 6 bagels, many laughs, and one broken phone, we finally completed our deck! A few run-throughs of our presentation later, we were headed home!
Tuesday, May 12
Success! We presented our project to the client and it went over well! We celebrated with a team brunch at the Lowry, which I followed promptly with a nap.
It’s a relief to be done with the project and have a few weeks of vacation before I start my internship on June 1. I know I’ll be able to take many of the things I learned during our 7-week CBE project and apply them to my internship this summer!