This week’s task was to create a small presentation in a small group on the design approach to getting student success. One of the suggestions put forth was that student-professor access was lacking, and so, we decided to focus our project on discovering ways to increase this. Only, there was one problem, there was no need for us to even find solutions, yet we did anyway and put in the time and effort to formulating them. As was mentioned in class, we were all biased towards solutions and, even when it was suggested that we could stop our presentation halfway, we decided to finish it in its entirety. I don’t entirely know why we were so focused on the solution instead of the design (Maybe it’s cause it’s more natural to have an end goal, or maybe it’s because classes like project management encourage solution based planning).

My main takeaway from that class was that it’s ok, and sometimes advantageous for solutions to take a back seat to design. I’m generally someone who is methodical; I follow a predetermined set of actions to get something done quickly and efficiently, but this class has shown me that a little bit of chaos in the planning stage is fine… I just have to get used to it.

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