- How has this course promoted your development of critical thinking, public speaking, writing, digital literacy, and/or teamwork skills, and how this has contributed to your understanding of leadership or your capacity to lead?
This course has helped me mostly with teamwork skills, critical thinking, and public speaking. I’m very comfortable with working alone and getting the work done on my own time and not have to worry about a partner not doing their part of the group assignment. This course was mainly group assignments and it helped me come out of my comfort zone and produce better working skills with other people. Having to do group projects all the time, we have to present them and I have never been really comfortable with that because it has always made me nervous but we’ve had to present many projects now so I’m starting to get better at speaking to groups of people. Group projects also helped me with public speaking in a way because I was almost never comfortable talking in a group, worrying that what I say doesn’t make sense or if the group doesn’t like my ideas. I’ve overcome that fear because no ideas are crazy and opinions matter. Once I became comfortable with that, I encouraged other group members to speak up and try to include their opinion or idea in the group as well. I’m fortunate to have my teamwork skills improve because of this class because this was the most group work I’ve done all first semester. Being able to work in a team effectively, shows that I can work with anyone. As I was working in my group there was a minor issue in the beginning and resulted in my partner and I having to take initiative and finish the work on our own. When you have to step up and do something that was not originally planned for you, that shows leadership and that shows initiative. No matter how many people don’t do their part, you can be a leader and help push them to do it, or if all fails, you have to take over. Social business has helped me with critical thinking as well because a leader has to use logic to understand and identify problems. It takes patience and a lot of practice in order to be successful. Social business also ensures me to be open minded and recognize and assess problems.
