David Ricardo

I am the first in my family to attend college and when it was time to select a college to attend, I did not get much help from family. I went to my advisor for advice on what college to attend and was given a book about the Colleges That Change Lives (CTCL), a group of colleges that focus on personalized and transformative college experience for their students. CTCL started as a book written by Loren Pope, retired New York Times education editor, journalist, student advocate, and independent college counselor, and is now a recognized non-profit around the nation. I was not one of those kids that knew exactly which college to attend, what I wanted to major in, and what I wanted to do as a job after graduating. Choosing my first college was the first big financial decision I made. In my college search, I knew I wanted to go out of state because I wanted to see how I handled living away from family and at the time did not realize going out of state meant higher tuition costs as opposed ...

After reading over my previous blog posts, the themes from one post do not tie into other posts. The topics that the previous blog posts have been about are: being opportunistic, transaction costs, team leadership and organization, and transfer costs. When I am writing about these blog posts I try to focus on explaining the situation and how it ties into the prompt or theme of the post. What ends up happening is I fail to provide enough detail of the situation for the reader to understand. For example,  in “Blog 4: Team Leadership and Organization” I should have went into more detail about how JROTC is structured or in “Blog 5: Transfer Costs” I should have explained how appointments at academic advisors and McKinley are prioritized like on what the appointment reason is. It is difficult for me to connect or incorporate the themes from previous blogs to the current week’s blog because I find writing very difficult and not enjoyable, the blogs are hastily written last minute or very...

If the university allowed students to use Illinibucks to move up their position on situations that are based on a priority basis, a few situations that this change could affect are appointments, reserving classrooms or equipment, and class registration. On campus, students are able to make appointments with academic advisors at the various colleges, counselors in the Turner Student Services Building, or medical professionals at Mckinley to name a few. The effect of Illinibucks in this regard can have a varying effect depending on how serious a student’s situation is. For academic advisors, a student could be seeking help figuring out a career path which is important but does not necessarily need immediate attention compared to a student that is failing one or more of their courses. For counselors, a student might just need some motivation to study for a test or do homework assignments meanwhile a student could be contemplating self harm or harming others. For McKinley, a student migh...