This weeks reading related to types of presentations, mainly oral presentations and power points. Throughout my academic career, I have been making power points and doing class presentations. I realize that it really is an art and a matter of balancing practice and preparation with spontaneity, but I think that sometimes its simply just easier and feels better to merely summarize what you want to say and "wing it".
This weeks readings about project proposals have been very helpful for me. Their details about the specefics of proposals helped me in sculpting my sections of our proposal and setting up the initial contact and such with our organization. It is very important when describing what you want to do to know exactly what needs to be done and how you will do it. Once you make contact with the organization however, it is also very important to know how to get their attention and to persuede them to be interested and do what you want.
This week, we started off going very efficiently with our project, deciding to work with the Indiana Blood Ceneter after having some rough times with our proposal logistics last week. Our ideas about helping them to market to blood donors and monetary donations went smoothly. We managed to contact them by phone and they notified us that we would be working with their marketing department.
This has been a more rewarding week for me in English 420, as we have finally seen the final products of all of the white paper projects in the form of presentations. For me, this helped to allow me to feel our acomplishments as well as those of other teams finally come together into a professional result.
Now, we have been assigned the reading reagrding the Service Learning Project and client criteria. After reading both of these, I feel that the project will be both challenging and rewarding for me and the others in the class.
One possible client for the community writing project would be the American Red Cross. I feel that this is a very competent and important organization because of the work that they do for people in need of medical care locally, nationally, and globally. There are many offices around the world and also of course right here in Indiana. I feel that they could use help in promotions for their projects and for marketting to potential donors. As they are not a commercial enterprise (they are a non profit organization) they do not already have a marketting department as a company does.
So far, this project is not going as smoothly as I had hoped. I feel that our group is very capable and working had, but that I'm having trouble getting some of the information I need from research online. I have also been running into sleep and illness issues which has been cutting into my time for conducting more accurate research. I didn't expect to be doing so much research in this class but I am really glad to be doing a project like this as I think it will be very useful in my future career in marketing and/or management.
It seems that the project is progressing quite rapidly and that now I'm starting to understand just how complicated writing the paper will be. This seemed like a simple research project at the beginning , but now I realize that the research aspect will have to be much more detailed than I thought. I have been having some trouble finding sources and information on my potential solution of price discrimination as generally most companies do not like information on tactics like this to be published.
So far I think that our project has been going pretty well, but the one problem that I've noticed is a lack of clarity and communication. Our entire team has been working very hard on our project and I think that we have a lot of great ideas and research about Piracy of software in China, and I think that this is certainly a unique topic and idea that hasn't been explored as much as most other controversial other topics, probably mainly due to the fact that people don't usually feel much sympathy for large software companies like microsoft or software pirates (the two sides of this issue).
Almost every office sitcom on tv talks about "memo's." Maybe one character describes getting a memo from another or sending them one, but I never really knew what a memo was or how it tied into the show or of cpourse the correct format for writing one until now. I always thought it was more of just a note written to someone, but I realise now that its really more formal and important than this.
Just up until a few days ago, I had never heard the term white paper used although I suppose I had seen this style of document before. I am excited to be doing a project like this as I feel that I am finally able to do a research project that will tie into skills that I will use when working in the real world after graduating rather than just the standard academic style of writing that I've always had to use in the past.