Wow, time sure flies when you're having fun! I spent my last week before school started plowing through an enormous stack of trash novels. It was a fabulous use of my time, I'm sure. lol. And last week was Residency Week... the first week of each year of school we take off work and go full time (and then some!) The entire week is 3 credits and it's jam packed. We did case studies, lectures, field trips and a 3-day StratSim competition. Oh, and we ate. A lot. I'm going to have to go on half rations for weeks to make up for it! But it was a lot of fun. Picture heavy post ahead!
Monday, we did a case study and lecture about a hospital and then went up to IHC in Murray for a lecture and also a tour about how they've turned into one of the premier medical centers in the country. It was fun - we carpooled up in vans and I always enjoy spending the time hanging out with my classmates and getting to know them better.
Tuesday, we did a case study and lecture about Harley Davidson and then, of course, followed that with a tour of the local Harley Davidson. It's a pretty amazing building, constructed of mostly found and re-purposed materials. And the bikes are pretty sweet too :) I took a bunch of pictures on my phone while we were there.
The famous and iconic water tower:
An original, 1918 Harley:
Checking out the bikes... here's Rick:
And Chad and Mark (who smiled and turned away before the picture finished taking. Argh.):
And Erik, expounding on the delights of owning a Harley to Greg and Rasmus:
Motorcycles aren't my brand of adventure, but I have to admit the bikes are gorgeous! We finished our visit with famous sliders from Marley's and then went back for a career coaching session.
Wednesday we worked in our teams on StratSim - we were broken into "worlds" simulating car industries and each team was a car manufacturer. We started with a small line of cars and a set of financial statements and spent three days simulating 8 years of business. We had to make decisions about marketing, manufacturing and product development and make sure we maintained a profit. The winner was the team with the highest cumulative net income. We were a competitive bunch! At the end of the day, we had a picnic for all of the class and families. It was too bad we had massive thunder and lightning, but it was a huge pavilion so we stayed dry and the kids still got a little use out of the moon bounces. I took some pictures of my group from last year.
Laura:
Mike and Janell:
Rick, Carolyn and their kids:
Brent and Sheralyn:
And Brent (AKA Captain) and Maggie... they aren't this blurry in real life (Go me with the awesome pictures! lol):
It was a fun night, even with the rain.
The rest of the week we worked on StratSim. This was serious business. Here's my group - my team was 4/5ths of this year's learning team... Tom, Mark and Mindy.
Our strategy was to sell stock to get lots of capital, invest a ton of money at the very beginning in technology and capacity capabilities and then increase capacity, production centers and products every year. We also wanted to spend a lot on marketing and make sure we watched our existing products and maintained our brand equity. We knew this would hurt our income in the first few years and it did... this had the effect of getting the other teams to count us out. Hehe... we did a major sneak attack in the 4th year and ended up winning the whole thing. We had the highest income of all 15 teams. Go us! Then we did a presentation on the whole thing which I ended up presenting and it went really well. Here we are with our trophy (and I love that it's actually an FBLA trophy for 8th place in Desktop Publishing. lol.)
Whew! It was quite a week! Right after we finished, I headed home to change clothes, gas up the car and head off to Twin Falls for Kim's wedding. It was just non-stop busy! (I'll post wedding pictures in the next post :)) Now I go back to my regular class schedule starting tomorrow and I'm excited to get going again. This should be a great year!
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