SPC1017 Group 1 Blog (2nd Blog) - Carlos Rodriguez

Hey guys for the second time, for the latest project our group got to present last instead of first. Even though we had more time to prepare, personally, I had the feeling that I had less time due to the fact that I was in the process of achieving multiple goals. One of these is finding and actually getting a different job. In the weeks when the project was assigned and while we were working on it, I had already applied twice with two more additional applications following suit in the upcoming days. I had so many plans happening in my life in conjunction with our project that the only time I really worked on it was those moments at the end of class when our group was separated and we all brainstormed ideas and decided on the best course of action for our own individual tasks.

                    To be honest,  there were some days I did not work on the project, in my defense, who could say no and ignore all the opportunities I had happening in life and are still happening.  While sitting in class one day I believe we were discussing the topic of Russia and their attack on Ukraine for the first time since it made headlines. I received a call from the new job saying they needed to see me talk about my position, long story short that day I was so excited that as soon as class ended I went straight to the interview and personally had no recollection about our project. Forgot it even existed for a moment sorry guys. To summarize the deviation, I landed the job and we were back on track with the project, I knew my topic, that of insurance being biased toward women and giving them a higher rate even though they had the same amount of experience and driving records as males of the same age. Now, even though I knew what I wanted to talk about, I didn’t actually have ready a template of some sort. I had no idea how it would look or how it would even take shape. “Maybe I should go and take ideas from my past project to see how we organized it and formatted the slides,” I thought to myself. So I did, I went back and started taking apart my previous project and basically grabbing the skeleton of it. After that, it was a cakewalk for me. 

           As mentioned above,  I had two goals, one was successfully landing my new job, and a result, here came my second unexpected goal. I knew I wanted a new car but wasn't sure of what brand and what type of car. I always wanted a sports car but most of the time it seemed to be Japanese or even Korean such as the genesis coupe. I really like Ford as a company but never thought I could see myself in a mustang, it was never an idea I came across often out. Even some of my friends said that they didn't think I was the type of guy to have a mustang which for me how does that make any sense, but of nowhere I started to see more mustangs and I enjoyed the looks so much that I started to consider them. After research and much consideration, I think I decided to be part of the mustang family, with all the prices of cars being extremely high, it made cars like a Honda Accord and Honda civic which were my original ideas of next cars to obtain; the same price of a mustang. In addition, the used car market is through the roof so I had to order one which usually takes around three months. How does this tie into our project you might ask? This was another distraction, just how reading this right now and deviating from my main topic is a distraction for you as a reader, fourth wall break? let's leave that to Deadpool at the movies. Finally, after everything was said and done and I had my order in, I went back to our project and started work again.

The cycle began once again, this time hopefully free of distractions, finally. I breezed through the information portion of the slides and added pictures to make it pretty like my previous project. I also matched the font of the words to match that of my peers so all our slides could look uniform. The hardest or most time-consuming part of this project in my opinion was that of the interview, I had a person to interview since the beginning of this project, and when the day came to interview them, they were too busy with work so at the last minute I had to find a whole new person which also had experience in the field of insurance. Luckily, I asked my mom if she knew someone and she said a family friend was an insurance broker that she would be more than happy to help. Just as my mom said, the Broker came in and saved my interview. This was two days before our presentation so for me, it was a very close call with work and other classes in between. The day of the presentation was weird because a lot of our classmates didn't show up so the ones that were present had to cover for them and present, we don't mind at all but I feel like it would have been way smoother with everyone here. One way or another I really enjoyed our topic and enjoyed working with my peers in creating our project. Really Looking forward to collaborating once more. If I would have to give someone in our group recognition it would be Alicia not as to say that everyone didn't do an amazing job, but just because in every project we do she is always making sure our tasks are completed if anyone needs any help or new idea, and the morning of the presentation when I was even half awake she was organizing everything and making sure our project was up to par with other groups. Thank you for that Ali.