Life as an Online College Student

Today, I chatted with two of my team mates in my strategic management class. One of my other teammates did not show to our chat. It really irritates me how people do not care about our group assignments. I think that if you are a member of a group then you need to show up at every agreed upon meeting or tell your team mates that you will not be attending the meeting. I think it is only the right thing to do. We have been working on our final case assignment. It is due on December 2nd 2008, which is a Tuesday and is in two days. I am very nervous because this is a crucial part of my final grade. My other group is not going well either. I submitted my portion to my fellow group team mates. They did not submit theirs and I have not heard from any of them in over two weeks. It is getting to the end of the semester and this is no time for slacking off. I really pride myself on doing the best job possible on my school work and I expect at least an effort from the others on my teams. Hopefully, tomorrow is a better day.

My semester ends in about two weeks. I am very excited. However, I am dreading research papers, final projects, and final exams. I am always excited to have a semester ends but as soon as one semester ends, another semester is sure to begin within a week or so. It takes so much time and hard work to finish a college course.I get incredibly stressed and I feel like I am never going to get everything that I need done, completed and finished. Still, there is no progress on my final project for my employee benefits class. I wish my team mates would contact me but they have not done that yet. I am especially worried because it is twenty five percent of our entire final grade so it is crucial for us to get a good grade to pass the course. I am hoping since it is week six of seven next week, that they will email me so we can get our final project started and completed as soon as possible. I love the holidays, I could use a break from school. It is hard to end a semester in college, but I am looking forward to being done with these two courses.

My black Friday School day was pretty boring. It is the day after Thanksgiving and still none of my group case members have gotten back to me about our final project. This means that we still have no pages for our final project completed. Like I have said before this irritates me because I want to get the best grade possible. I worked on my discussion questions today. We were supposed to write on an ethics question that our professor posted. The question was would you speak up if you manager wanted you to manufacture pajamas that might cause cancer in kids? I answered no because I could never live with myself if innocent children got cancer because of my choices. A job is not worth violating my own personal ethics. I think too many people blur the ethical lines when they are working. They say it is okay to do certain things because no one will notice, or no one will get hurt. We all need to keep our own morals and ethics near and dear to our hearts.

My college assignment is to take a company’s current benefit program and make it better. We are working in groups of three to research a company, work with the company’s benefits manager and formulate the company’s benefits program. We are having a hard time since the research paper has to be eight to ten pages long. We are having trouble getting started with the project and it is due in a little over a week. I am very worried about this assignment because it is a huge part of my final grade for my employee benefits college course. My teammates are all girls, we try and keep in contact but it is hard dealing with the fact that everyone has such busy lives. One of my teammates has a son who needed an emergency tonsilectomy so she has not been in contact with us. The problem is we picked her company so we need vital employee benefits information from her. It is going to be hard to make our deadline.

It is Thanksgiving time again at my online college. I dread holidays because I am always so busy. Thanksgiving time is a time to be thankful. I am very thankful for my family. I am thankful for the ability to seek a higher education. I am not thankful for my homework though. They can keep the homework assignments, they are not fun to do at all. My online college still has assignments due on Thanksgiving. It is not fun, but hey they have to be completed or I will not get a good grade in my class. I am still at a loss about what I want to do for a career down the road. I like business but I do not know if it is my one true calling in life. You know what I mean? Is anyone doing a career that they actually love? I see so many people that are stressed out due to job obligations and family commitments. Hopefully, I will be able to finish all of my homework assignments so that I can thoroughly enjoy my holiday weekend.

I am taking two business classes. One is on employee benefits and the other is on crafting a business strategy. I prefer my employee benefits class. My professor in that class is very nice and he is always trying to help us get the best grade possible. He is such a nice gentleman. He has been my professor once before but I doubt that he would remember me since he teaches other classes. Today, we our finishing our case as soon as we submit it we have another case to divide up and start all over again. Luckily, we only have one more case to go after this case is completed. Then we have final exams to complete during our seventh and final week of class.My employee benefits has a huge group paper due in two weeks but my fellow team mates have not started it yet. I am very worried since it has to be eight to ten pages long. One of my teammates had a family emergency so hopefully she will be back by the end of the week. Life is tough right now. I wish this semester was over.

Today, my online college day was pretty boring and mundane. As I had already stated I had a standardized test to take, now we are yet again working on our group assignments. Our team had a team chat last night. It was not very exciting. We meet all the time and nothing seems to get accomplished. My group members in my business strategy class just do not care about working together they just want to skate by and get a passing grade. That is not my style at all. I want to get as many A’s as possible because I want my grade point average to be as high as it can possibly be. I do not understand why a person would just want to pass a class. I mean your grades do go on to your transcript and you need your transcript in order to get into graduate school down the road. It is hard to get into a good graduate school  when you attend online college courses. Many times they will make you fill out a lot of extra paperwork because they don’t see online courses as equals to regular college courses. It has been a long day today. Hopefully, tomorrow is much better for me.

I recently had to take a standardized test for my college course. I was not happy since it is stressful and does not count. We get a huge penalty if we did not take the standardized test so to have any hope of passing my current class I had to comply and take the exam. The standardized test was very difficult. I am sure that I did not do a very good job at all. I mean the wording of the test was very hard to comprehend. They want to measure how well we are doing in our college courses but these tests are too difficult and many of my fellow classmates agreed with me. I think that standardized tests cannot measure how knowledgeable you are in a particular subject or topic. I mean you can be very intelligent or book smart and have absolutely no common sense whatsoever. I am lost as to why educators want us all to take standardized tests I mean I would rather just have a transcript of my grades show how knowledgeable I am in a subject and call it a day. It was a very stressful experience. Have any of you taken these tests?

Finding a research paper topic has been a difficult task for me to complete. I just have on interest in any of the business topics that are available to me. Our professor puts topics that we are supposed to write about and then we email her with out choices and a outline of what we will do for our research paper. It is hard to write a ten to twelve page research paper about a topic that you do not like. I have to be really motivated to write a good research paper. I have to choose my topic soon because my paper is due in four weeks which is the end of our fall semester. It is hard to know what the professor wants and what you are capable of accomplishing because I have two very hard business classes this semester. It can be very tiring because the professors do not help us, they just give us guidelines and due dates. Have you all ever dealt with research papers in college? What are your tips to surviving these very difficult papers?

Have you ever had a professor who was a tough grader? This semester my professor does not give us whole grade she gives us grades like 4.2 out of 5. It drives us all insane because she never explains why we get points taken off. I would rather have whole points this.2 thing gets annoying. Professor are tough and many times they will not tell you what you did wrong unless it is a research paper or an exam where they put what the right answer is. I always get frustrated because lets say you get a 92.2 you won’t get a 93 which is an A. These .2 points can really add up and deduct from the student getting a better letter grade. I don’t know I wish I had a better understanding of how this grading system works. I am halfway through the semester and I have a 85.2 so I need every single point that I can get so that I can pass my class. What do you think about college grading systems?