Susan Athey Econ 490 Fall 2019

I’ve thought about how my current decision affect my future since I was in high school. Since most universities are looking for people they think will succeed at their school, and since I wasn’t a genius, I knew that I needed to be a well-rounded person to get into a good university. That being said, I tried to have decent grades ending high school with a 3.5 GPA. I then played multiple sports for my high school as well as travel teams. I did enjoy playing on those teams because it allowed me to be active every day, but it was a huge time commitment during those 3 years. Besides school and sports, I was part of 2 clubs and worked two jobs. I was in Rotary interact club because it was a volunteer group and I thought having that on my application would help me in the long-run. I then was in a Spanish club because my teacher offered extra credit if we attended, and I thought it would be a good way to raise my grade and another thing to put on my college applications. I worked two jobs...

I believe that there is a theme within all our previous blog posts. The blogs focus on situations that are more personal or micro-based. For a good portion of the blogs, we talk about a situation that have happened to us and explain the decisions that were made. We then analyze the choices and determine what might have been a better decision.  In my opinion I found it hard to connect things that happened to me to course themes. I believe that there are some instances where it might connect to the course is some parts, but the overall event didn’t. The easiest post that connected to the course was the first blog post about transaction cost and being part of a group. After spending more time on other topics, I feel that all decisions in an organization has a transaction cost. One thing that I realized was that it was hard to submit the post early because the discussion in class ties the readings and the slides together. What I used to do was just write the posts and read...

Allocating each student at the university a fund of Illinibucks could cause ethical problems and essentially only benefit the wealthy students. The concept of having Illinibucks to cut lines can be implemented in many different aspects including registering for classes early, cutting the line to see a professor/TA, skipping the line for football games, renting rooms/technology/books, etc. If I was allotted Illinibucks, the first thing I would spend it on would be for registering for classes earlier. This would allow me to create the perfect schedule and the benefit would last the semester rather than an hour. Then, I would spend it on cutting the line at the book store. The reason I would choose this second is that I like to get the textbooks when the class starts so that I have to opportunity to get a head start in the class and that is when the bookstore is crazy and has thousands of students go through every day. This would allow me to be in and out quickly and guarantee that I’ll h...