Business Majors are required to have an arsenal of people skills to be successful because of the rising popularity of the major. Universities and Colleges around the nation have noticed this trend, and have started to emphasize these majors more. These degrees rely on what the business does and how it operates. The degree also brings in a teamwork aspect of the job world, you’re not necessarily held to have a business job with a business major, you may branch out and do other sorts of jobs. Retail stores and restaurants are always looking for a leader/team oriented person to add to their arsenal.  There are multiple choices of courses in the major. Every choice has a certain emphasis and important difference than the other. Some courses will lean more towards stores and travel, while others are going to have an emphasis on the international spectrum of business.

As the article by The Guardian says, “The common threads of any business degree, however, tend to be looking at finance, marketing and human resource management.” So in any of the business jobs you take in the world, you’re almost guaranteed one of those three focuses stated by The Guardian. The business major has a lot of math orientated jobs as well, with all the financing needed to be done in a business; math should be of high priority! Numbers will be floating around your job no matter what job you take in business, so be prepared.

 By the time of graduation, all of those skills definitely need to be at their best. Whether it’s financing, marketing, or management, those skills are very relevant in many different ways in multiple different jobs! As a business major, you shouldn’t be afraid of standing up in front of the class to present your ideas or argue your points with other students to make sure they know your point of view. With group work a key part of many courses, your team work ethic will be at a very high caliber, you should have a key understanding of how to make sure you can comprehend all your team members’ thoughts and be able to compile them into one goal. You should also have an understanding of the ethical implications of business operations. If retail is your main focus of study, you should be able to make fair trade and price negotiation a key part of your arsenal of skills. A key part of managing others is the ability to relate to them and understand their needs, all skills you should be developing during your degree.

The downside of the uprising of students in the business major is that it cause a major change in competition in the field. In essence, the job market for business students will slowly get smaller and smaller because of the jobs being taken by previously graduated business majors. And because it's not as specialist a field as architecture or medicine, you’ll have the chance to have competition with other students who were in other fields of study that decided to choose business in their last year of college. That said, the experience you earned and all the skills you’ve gained from being a business major will help place you in a nice secure job in the City or firm somewhere in the world. These graduate schemes should give you a good general grounding in business and the chance to focus on a particular area, such as human resources, or finance or marketing.

What makes a good business major? Any business degree will involve working with numbers and stats You should also have the ability to see the big picture when it comes to making a project or long term goal happen, being considerate of the goals of the group, considering the raw materials or rough data, and developing plans to move projects forward. As a business major, you should have the ability to communicate with written and verbal information, be excellent at team work, and work well under sometimes sustained pressure.

 http://www.theguardian.com/education/2008/may/01/universityguide.businessandmanagementstudieseducationsubject

Hey gang! I want to introduce you to Ali Daly, our new employee! She is going to be joining our engineering team in our company, so I want you to get to know her well before she even gets here. Ali is went to school for engineering so she likes to be very detailed in her work, but she often needs to be brief and concise with her writings, so in light of that I would like for you guys to communicate with her on a brief and concise way. Here at Mettner.Co we like to make sure our employees feel right at home, so if you could approach her as a partner and not some innocent person that is fine with not knowing anything that would be key. I need you guys to make sure she knows how everything runs around her, even if it means she has to get a little bit of tough love. I’m sure she’ll understand because she has been in the position before with her race team. She built baja cars and mini-formula cars in college so she knows what it is like to be a newbie! You can be as blunt as you want with her about what goes on here, she isn’t much for sugar coating the truth, she chose our business for a reason! She is here to do her job and get paid, that’s how the engineering quarters do their job. Make sure you guys read this and do what it says because that how we are going to make Ali feel just as home! Thank you!

I would find out how writing works in my field by first asking someone who has experience in the field, getting personal knowledge from someone in the field is a million times better than getting information from a book or any sort of article. The library would be the second place I would look for information. The library has thousands of books and one of them is bound to be the right book to help me find out more about how writing or anything works in my field of study. The internet also is a very viable source to look for information, but not necessarily my first choice because if the possibility of misleading or incorrect information. The internet definitely is the easiest way to find information about writing in my field because the internet is ginormous! The specifics are going to be hard to find because realistically finding a source that answers my question specifically is very rare to find, and to also find a scholarly source that answers my question will be twice as hard. Maybe there is a professor out there who could help me in my search.

The piece on rhetorical reading really stood out to me from the beginning. The piece started off with connecting to me as a person because I definitely am a person who reads a book and spaces out while reading. If I’m not into the reading that happens a lot. But that isn’t the main part of the piece, she outlines how every reader should take apart a piece and try to make a reader judge what the writer is saying too. The more and more I read the piece I realized I already do half of those steps to see what I’m reading. I do that because it’s always been a habit for me when I’m on the internet. I judge the piece by its title and introduction to see if I really want to read it and then if I do I continue with the other steps to see what the writers point of view is on the situation. Now the only problem to be had here is doing these with scholarly articles, it’s not a very familiar territory for me. Most of the time I’m pretty interested in the articles I read, but the pieces I’ve been trying to read for my scholarly sources aren’t really fitting the criteria of what the writer wants. The pieces to me have gone flat and boring, they are missing out a lot of points that I want to see in an article so I can be able to write a halfway decent summary. But anyway main point of this blog is to say that the reading has really refined the way I look at articles for information, and that I really do most of the steps leading to putting things together to find a good article. This article has taught me that I really don’t need to sit there and start hard to find something good, I have to read smarter and not HARDER.

Korn, Melissa. "Wealth or Waste? Rethinking the Value of a Business Major." Wall Street Journal. 14 Apr. 2012: A1+. Print.

Snyder, William. "Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier" 

     Cengage Learning. (2000): Web. 19 Jan. 2014.

            I see myself as one of those writers like Sonia Sotomayer. I am very scared of public opinion on anything that I do, not just writing. Writing is one of the things I’m most scared of though, I have inherited through my childhood. In my childhood I had to meet so many expectations from my family. Mom and Dad always pushed me to do my best, and that was good and bad. It wasn’t necasarily just my school work, it was sports. Dad was an All-State basketball and football player for his school and expected the same out of me. Dad was on the bad side of pushing me to do better, he did the whole thing where he was never proud of me. That’s all I ever actually wanted as a kid, to be appreciated and for Mom and Dad to see me as something to proud of. Sure Mom was proud of me, but that’s what moms are supposed to do, every boy wants their dad’s approval. It drove me mad that I was never “appreciated” by Dad, he would never understand how I felt. And that’s what set up my fear of disapproval.

            I also feel that I can be a very confident writer at the same time though, which might not make sense. If I feel very passionate about that topic or want to show that I can put a valid point forward, I will do whatever is needed to express that. It is in that point where I don’t care what people think because I’m letting them know what it’s like to see it possibly from a different point of view and if they don’t respect that, that’s their loss. That’s basically how my good pieces of work come about, is that if I enjoy what I’m reading and that I feel I can have a positive impact by writing something about it.

            I really don’t prepare myself for writing too well, it’s just not me. Every English class taught me that I need to have an outline and notecards, and that just made things too complicated for me. It made me feel like I needed to have notes from to remember what I was thinking at the time or an outline to form the paper, but I can’t work that way. My best work in school came from when I would read a piece or an article of some sort and open up a text document and let my thoughts do the work. It wasn’t even like I was doing anything, my fingers were just typing and I wasn’t controlling them. That’s what kind of writer I am.

            Maybe I’m not the best writer because of my insecurities and lack of organization and that could slow me down I guess. I need to realize everything isn’t going to perfect or close to it when I try to formulate it. To be honest, I am just being way too sensitive about something that shouldn’t be. This self-perception I have about myself is definitely hindering my writing skills. I have to write like I only need to impress myself and do what I think I is right. The best writers of their time went against the rules and did something different to stand out. That goes with everything in the world. Look at the Renaissance for instance, that was full of change and artists doing things out of the ordinary. The whole world of art changed, and it was a GOOD thing, so I need to apply that to my writing, though it may be different it can be a good thing!

            Some of the writings I enjoy are research papers, if they’re on something I find appealing. I love giving out information and teaching people other things that they might not have known before. Research papers are especially fun when I can give my own input to the paper, or how I feel about what I’m writing. Being able to express my feelings on anything that I write about is something that I love doing. I also enjoy writing things with a lot of meaning, in my off time I like to write song lyrics every so often.

            There are definitely writings that I dislike, and unfortunately for any English teacher, there is a lot of things I dislike about writing. Anything that I need to prepare thousands of notes or anything that I have to prepare an outline to help “Organize” my thoughts is definitely something I will not be fond of. I’m a spontaneous writer that reads a piece and writes what I think about the piece right after I’m done while the thoughts are fresh. As I’ve said before, I’m not one to be organized or even care to organize my thoughts. I feel like the teacher is trying to refine my thoughts into what they think should be a good paper.

            It’s funny that I bring up the rule of grammar as a rule that blocks my writing. I feel it’s like an excuse to not want to write but grammar is sometimes hard to get a hold of when you’re trying to write a super long paper. It angers me when I spend a lot of time on a paper and get my point across and do great research and only get a C because of “grammar”. Like seriously? I understand yes, grammar can be important, but if I got my point across and hit all the main points what’s wrong some LITTLE grammar problems? It’s not like I wasn’t understood because I forgot a comma or anything. So when it comes to writing a paper, if I don’t feel my grammar is absolutely correct I scratch the whole sentence, no matter how great it could’ve been.

            When I went back to my blog post, I realized I focus a lot on emotion when I write, that I feed off of positive energy and use it my benefit when I write. I say this because I use the phrases “I feel” and “pep talk” often in the post. It is true that I am an emotional writer, because when I read something that sparks something in my brain or makes my heart drop, I’m instantly thinking of many different ways I could address the issue in writing. On the flip side, if I’m depressed or saddened by the reading, I am kind of scared of putting any emotion into the writing seeing as it might get ridiculed, only making it worse. I also found out from the blog that I’m very scared of being judged by my peers, they’re the ones I seek approval from when I’m not home and away at school.

This article hits a lot of points that I agree are very important to an aspiring writer or any sort of writer. Goodman brings up a lot of points that I always have going through my head too when I’m writing papers or just fun stories. She is basically saying in a very complex way to just be yourself and write what you want. This piece she writes is kind of just a pep talk that you should think to yourself when you’re composing any sort of writing. I really like how she goes to the personal aspect of writing and tells you to be positive about your work and just do your thing. As with anything you do in life, writing is just the same. In sports you are going to miss some calls or air ball some shots, you will do the same in writing. You shouldn’t be discouraged or even mad at yourself, be proud. The bad things you compose you can learn from, just like if you shoot enough free throws in basketball you will start to understand the flow of things. She also explains the public side of writing too. Like if you were to make a bad piece and the public ridicules it and critiques it, just make sure to take it with a grain of salt and make a better piece next time. But whatever you do, don’t doubt yourself, because the second you do, you’ve lost. She explains that nothing is more depressing than going back to an empty drawing board after you’ve started a project. Just put your heart into the writing and put yourself and the world of your paper. Just like you left the scene of the crime, you will have a remembrance of the place and it will come to you in detail. So if you are ever in a pickle, just think harder and try and get closer and closer to the “scene of the crime”. I enjoy this piece because its just like any motivational speech your coach would give you, you can apply this piece to anything in your life. All Goodman is saying is be a standout person and give it everything, and you will do great at whatever you do. It may not be good for others, but it should be good for you because you’ve accomplished something. That something is now a part of you and always will be, so show it off with pride!