Dead Week Student Behavior

It is absolutely astounding how most students, at least those in the Jake Jabs College of Business and Entrepreneurship completely change their day to day lives during the last two weeks of the semester. Not just studying habits, but eating, sleeping and socializing and I believe that I can speak for the students in the marketing department when I say, there is almost nothing we can do about it. Yes, I admit that during my freshmen and sophomore years, I didn't put in all that much effort to school. But as students advance through their years of college, the curriculum gets more comprehensive and requires more effort from each student.

After years of putting in the bare minimum and being unsatisfied with the results, I have changed the way I study for exams and the overall effort I put into my education. I read all the chapters and required articles, I participate in classes and it has been proven to work. However, no matter how much work I put in during the semester, I still can't do anything about my groups having different schedules. It often happens where group members are not able to meet until everybody takes work off and starts to skip class because deadlines are a necessity.

I think the huge problem of procrastination arises because many projects are all due at the same time, but sometimes the curriculum required for each project isn't covered in class until it's almost too late. I have so much time during the week that I could be spending on school work that is wasted because we havent reached a certain point in a class. I believe that standards based education is going to take over at some point in American education. This is basically that once you are competent and meet standards, you could potentially be done with a class and move on with your education. My father works for an education research firm and is implementing standards based education in schools across america. Below are notes taken from a teacher at a high school in Denver after one of his presentations.

Elevator Pitch Findings

I created somewhat of an updated storyboard about our product mentioned in my last blog and pitched the idea to five people, both male and female, ranging from ages 21 to 27, and my father who is 52. They all seemed to like the idea. Resulting from these pitches, what people liked most about our possible product are as follows

1. Good way to inform others about local events
2. Great way to meet people
3. Great way to make plans when you don't have any
4. Helps people get out of the house and interact with others
5. Great way to meet people who share similar interests
6. Encourages people to branch out
7. Could make the living experience in Bozeman more exciting

The things that were listed above definitely show that this product does in fact address a solution to the problem that 20 year olds have a hard time communicating although they have an immense ability to connect with others. Some problems or questions that arose from my pitches include:

1. We don't have a name.
2. How can we expand to other locations? How do we decide which locations to target?
3. How can this be profitable?
4. How can you make this app popular?
5. We never addressed including a feature of seeing what event your friends are going to, maybe connect it with Facebook? 
6. Do we want people to see what their friends are doing if this app is designed to meet new people?
7. How do you get local businesses to participate?
8. Is this something people need?
9. How can we make this fun?
10. Will this end up just be bars promoting themselves?
11. Add filters such as "Under 21" "Music" "Game night" "Religious Gatherings" "Low Key" and so on
12. Can it make recommendations based on what type of events you have gone to in the past? Kind of how you like a song on pandora and it plays similar music based on that.
13. Should it be anonymous? should you be able to create a profile and be able to connect with those who you meet?
14. Will people actually follow through and go to these events?
15. Links to purchase tickets for concerts or directions to the events?

I believe that the feedback i received from my peers is incredibly useful and can help make this app a possibility

Design Spring Day 2

After the first day of the design sprint,  we determined that one of the major problems that 20 year old's face is that they lack communication skills. Although they are part of the most social and widely connected generation, they are not often exposed with real people like other generations have been. A lot of their lives are filled with smart phones, apps like Tinder and Snapchat are not helping solve this problem, but rather facilitating the growth of it. These apps allow kids to communicate through an online interface without having to be next to others in person.

Once we determined our issue, we needed to figure out how to solve it. e attempted to find a solution by doing multiple design sprint exercises, starting with a crazy eights project. this was consisted of drawing eight simple stick figures with a potential solution each drawing took approximately 30 seconds and helped us generate ideas for storyboarding. 

Next, we drew storyboards, from the ideas generated from the previous exercise, we drew an eight frame story about our product idea. the best storyboards were voted on, we scrutinized each others stories to help generate more ideas and find out more about each story, then we voted again. The best idea we determined to have was an app kind of like tinder, but for events. Imagine that you had an app that shows you what is going on in your location that night. Next we will be pitching this idea to some friends.

Design Sprint: Day 1

Millennials have problems. Lots of problems. Lots of ridiculous problems no other generations have had. Problems that arise from a tremendous amount of opportunities. Problems that arise from having a good life. We are doing a design sprint in order to solve one of these problems.

The first day of the design spring consisted of basically listing problems, coming up with a cognitive map, map, and focusing on one specific question. Some of the practical problems we determined were: Having a sense of belonging, having a lack of practical skills arising from an over-dependence on parents, disconnect from parents even though we overly depend on them. Other issues that we had dealt with pertained to addiction: addiction towards feeds, streams, updates, texts, mentions, retweets, likes, shares, upvotes, adiction to drinking (not necessarily alcoholism, but partying all the time), adiction to a bummed out lifestyle, TV shows, procrastination.

The central idea that we focused on was that we are the most social generation, but we lack social skills and are afraid of interaction. "I wish I knew how to talk to girls sober," "I wish I knew where I belong," "I wish I knew how to disconnect myself." We feel as if we address the issue of social incompetence, we could definitely find a product that could serve as a solution.

Less Choices, Better life

When given limitless choices, people end up making better decisions, however it results in a lower level of utility.

This is an obscure idea to grasp at first. How could I be better off with less options? We live in a world where we are forced to make thousands of decisions every day, some being unfavorable. Wouldn't it be better if I had more options? This was my opinion before reading this book, but when examining the idea on my own, I can see how a surplus of options can be a bad thing.

Take music for example, my generation has seen a huge technology shift over the past ten years. In elementary school, I got a portable CD player for christmas and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. I could now listen to my Ramones and Social Distortion CD's on the bus to school!!! (I was a weird kid) When I got tired of the same tracks over and over again, I could just pop over to the radio. I was incredibly happy with what seemed like limitless options. 

Fast-forward to when middle school rolled around and I got a Zune, yes a Zune, and from there I could simply download songs on my parents computer and my options increased tremendously from there. I explored new music because now it was available online and as I added more and more music, my storage shrank at the same rate. I reached a point where I could no longer add songs. I got frustrated trying to decide what albums I had to erase and which ones to add. Although I had thousands of more options, I found myself less happy with my Zune as I was with my simple little CD player.

The iPod touch really changed the game because iTunes was much more user friendly than Zune software. It actually ended up having less storage capabilities because of all the apps and games I had downloaded and defeated the purpose of why I got it, to play music. Once again I was less satisfied with my iPod than I was with my CD player.

And then high school came smartphones were the way of the future. Internet streaming services and internet radio dominated my time. This was the first time that I truly had a limitless amount of options for music. I could listen to anything whenever and wherever I wanted. I quickly ditched iTunes and only had Spotify and Pandora apps. These two services are what I still use today. Going back to the central idea of this blog, Spotify gives you the freedom to make any limitless decision on what to listen to. I can pick my songs but often I spend valuable study time trying to decide and results in extended hours in the library. Pandora on the other hand gives you the option to pick a station, list your preferences and then makes all the decisions for you from there. This is why I now only listen to Pandora when I study. I never waste time picking a song because I can't, as a result I do better school work, I spend less time and I get better grades.

Like the book suggested, I limit my options in many aspects of life to save time and make myself happier. Although I like having the power to make my own decisions, I can recognize that at times i'm far happier when I don't give myself those options.