River Reflection 2

When I realized that I needed to go write my second river reflection before Wednesday, I thought the idea was too insane to even consider. After all, with a week full of tests, papers, and presentations, who has time to go sit by the river anyway? I knew I needed to go, but the idea of losing even an ounce of efficiency in order to go sit and do nothing made my head spin. However, today before class I begrudgingly got up and went to sit and watch the river in a nice spot right by the restaurant the Woodshed. When I first sat down I found myself constantly thinking about what would need to be done later today, and I decided I would try to make this time useful by organizing out my week, while I just “checked the box” of going to the river. However, as time went by these thoughts of what lie ahead in the week slowly faded away, as then I could only feel the wind whirl past me and the sun hit my face.  After awhile I just found myself sitting and thinking about nothing, which was surprisingly relaxing. It is almost that sitting and observing the river reminded me that there is a world outside of TCU, and while all the various work, projects, and assignments do matter, they are not the only thing going on in the world. It seems that while I originally believed that this time spent by the river would simply be a waste, as it would not contribute anything to completing the various tasks I had in front of me, this time actually turned out to be an investment. Specifically, I believe that the time spent sitting by the river was actually incredibly well spent, as I now again feel rejuvenated after a much needed break.

            Another observation that I had which I found relevant to the aforementioned discussion was seeing two elderly people ride their bikes along the path near the bench I was sitting. Specifically, seeing the amount of fun these people were having was especially profound to me, as from an outsider’s perspective it seemed as if they did not have a care in the world.  Watching these people who likely had already lived the majority of their life, like the river, served to put the world in perspective for me. I had the thought that no matter what is so pressing in front of you, it will likely be nothing but a blip in your long life. This is not to say that many things that are difficult are not important and will have no impact on the rest of your life, but overall I believe that I tend to stress out over things in the short term and that every once in awhile I need my outlook on life adjusted to account for the fact that these issues may not matter as much as I think they do.

Never Discount a Learning Opportunity

Seeing as we are currently in the middle of the semester, one learning experience that I have had at work is especially relevant. I was recently given a task in which my boss requested that I put together a memorandum by the end of the week that analyzed the suitability of a foreign country for investment. I found that writing the memo itself was quite difficult as almost too much information exists on the country, but nevertheless I pushed forward and slowly throughout the week I began to shape what looked like a half-decent memo. Around 3:00 Friday I finally finished the memo to the best of my ability and turned it into my boss for any revisions or corrections. After around 30 minutes I received the revisions, and I was pleased to see that my boss was very happy with the overall memo, and did not have much to criticize. However, he did ask for a very specific graph to be created and inserted into the report. While gathering requested information and creating corresponding graph would normally be a fairly simple task, the format in which the graph was requested meant that it would not be as simple putting together a simple line graph in excel. I did not want to ask my boss or any full time employees because I felt that this was my task and I wanted to be solely responsible for its completion. I struggled as I tried to figure out exactly how to make this graph work in excel, and as time went by I started to feel the pressure as the end of the day got closer and closer. However, just as I was about to give up, it hit me - I remembered that we had learned how to build this exact graph in our excel class last semester. When I was in that class, I remember thinking to myself how useless it was learning how to build this graph because I believed no one actually used it in the “real world”. Needless to say, I was able to put the graph together, effectively finishing the memo.

However, even though I successfully finished the memo, I couldn’t help but being impacted by the thought that I had discounted a learning opportunity just because I didn’t feel that it was useful at the time. I began to wonder what other possibly valuable learning opportunities that I had ignored or chalked up as purely academic. I think it is apparent that sometimes I overestimate my own ability to the extent that I end up trying to decide what is important enough to learn and what isn’t.  However, what I have learned from this is that you never know what you will end up using someday, so you should try to learn everything you can. At the very least, you may never use something but you will become a more well-rounded person, and at the most you can use a skill to directly help your work efforts.

Overall, as a result of this experience I will definitely not take the learning opportunities I have at TCU for granted. Instead, I will try to “soak up” everything to the best of my ability because I have learned that you never know what you will and won’t use, so you should try to take advantage of every learning opportunity.

On the Debate of Water Ownership: A Free Markets Argument

Throughout all of the reading and discussions involving the world’s water shortage, the topic that I have found most interesting is that of water rights ownership. While there is currently no consensus on a state level, I find myself a proponent of allowing private individuals or entities to own water rights.  My basis for this argument is that I believe the free markets are much better able to allocate precious resources than any government entity, and at the end of the day supply and demand of any resource should determine its price. While this is a bold claim, I do have justification. Think of the last time you went to a USPS post office, did you find that the office was run efficiently and that operations were in great shape? The most likely answer is no. The United States Postal Service is one of many examples of the government’s failure to provide a good or service better than the market. This is because free markets contain an intense amount of competition that both rewards those who are productive and innovative and punishes those who are inefficient and lazy. As a result of this competition, firms in a free market are constantly fighting to find more efficient, productive, and overall better ways to provide their service or they will find themselves replaced by a competitor. On the other hand, government agencies and services face no such competition. No matter how good or bad a job is done they stand to face no reward or punishment, there is no motivation to innovate. The following chart, courtesy of Zero Hedge, displays the operating profit / loss of the USPS over the past decade. A private firm with this level of poor performance would no longer be existent.

How is this all of this discussion relevant to the issue of water rights? As Mark Twain once said, “history does not repeat, but it does rhyme”. Given both the certainty of a water shortage going forward as well as the poor track record of the government in running various operations, the question I pose is: If the government does a poor job managing your mail do you want them to manage your water? I would answer no. This topic will become increasingly important as our water supply continues to be strained, and the given the critical nature of supplying our nation with water I would rather the free markets determine the most suitable candidate to do so.

As an as aside, one topic of discussion in class involved water commoditization, which it turns out is a process already in the works. In March of 2014 a new Australian futures exchange opened that allows individuals to trade and speculate on the price of water just like any other commodity, and so far (as of June 25th) 16.5 billion liters of water have changed hands on this new market. I think it is fascinating that while futures trading can be traced back to the time of Aristotle, thousands of years later this same financial innovation is only just beginning for water.

River Reflection: Canoe Trip

While technically the syllabus instructs us to find a nice place to sit by the Trinity river while we write our river reflections, I think there is no better time observe the river than while floating down it. On September 19^th, myself and several of my classmates were given the opportunity to take canoes and kayaks down the Trinity river to better give us a sense of what it was like for Huck and Jim to be floating down the Mississippi River. In all honesty, while I was looking forward to this class assignment as I thought it was an innovative way to break away from the typical lecture, I was not expecting anything profound.

            Between both school and work, during any given week I find myself leading the life of the typical student (AKA so busy you hardly have time to breathe). Personally, one of the largest impacts of this constant work and stress is that I find myself being overly pragmatic to the point that I develop a “tunnel vision”, wherein I cannot focus on anything but the most immediate tasks. As a result, I often find myself bouncing back and fourth between an activity, assignment, or project, and in the midst of completing everything I am blind to the world that surrounds me. In other words, every goal turns into just a means to an end, as I never slow down long enough to immerse myself in my surroundings. With that being said, it was for that exact reason that I enjoyed the canoe trip so much. As we paddled down the Trinity and everyone began to filter out into groups I found myself alone floating down the river in my kayak. With no one in near proximity I was able to, for the first time in a long time, able to just sit and observe the nature that lay around me. While rowing down the river I found myself taken back at the fact that while I drive right by the Trinity River every day, I had never given it a second thought.

I specifically remember taking a deep breath and simply being overwhelmed by the sunset as I could hear the ambient sounds of the nature that envelopes the river. Even though we couldn’t have been more than 15 minutes away from TCU, it felt as if we could have been hundreds of miles away. I found it very striking that in the midst of running back and forth between school and work that the river has, and always will be, existing in the same state. In this way I think the river greatly contrasts with the environment that surrounds it because as the world we live in continues to move exponentially faster, the river is not affected by any new changes or technology and simply keeps flowing.

While I was only on the river for a brief period of time before I was quickly taken back to the real world, the thought of the existence of a place so enveloped by nature will always serve as a reminder to me to look beyond the next task, project, or assignment.

Learning Experience: Quickness Versus Accuracy

I have had an internship every year since the summer before my freshman year of college, and through these work experiences I have learned a great number of things. However, one thing I have always struggled with is striking the correct balance between quickness and accuracy when turning in a work project. Whenever I would work on a project I would always have trouble deciding on whether it would be better to focus on getting it done immediately or taking my time and 100% ensuring its accuracy. Now it is not to say that this lack of understanding lead to poor work products, as I felt my employers were generally pleased with my work, but this dilemma was constantly on the back of my mind. Instead of taking the initiative to figure it out, perhaps by asking my boss directly, I chose to continue on with the question unanswered. Looking back on it, it seems that I hoped that luck alone would guide me on striking the correct balance. For a long time the system I had worked, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was doing, but I seemed to be doing something right. However, I always wondered what the explicit answer was to my dilemma.

By now you might have guessed, I recently was in a position were I was able to have my questions answered. I just started a new internship for the school year, and in completing one of my basic responsibilities for a partner of the firm I made a blatant error that this individual caught. While I am not sure how exactly I made the error, it was clear that if I wouldn’t have rushed through the task that the error could have been avoided, or at the least I could have caught it before handing the project over. Nonetheless, the individual called me into their office and sat me down. While I was preparing to at least find myself in the direction of a raised voice, the individual instead provided the answer to the question that had been with me throughout all of my jobs. This person told me that while it was very common for a young person to want to get everything done very quickly because that is what people full time with experience do, as someone new (to either a job or the workforce itself), you should instead be focused on the accuracy of your work. They then went on to describe that when you are learning that the key is doing accurate work and after enough practice the quickness is learned on its own. Now I know that all of this seems very logical, and I believe it is something that I have implicitly known for many years, but I found it very profound to have someone whom I lookup to and is very successful spell it out for me. Without ever receiving a clear answer, I would have continued to have lingering doubts whether I was approaching work the right way, which would have lead to more carless errors in the future. Therefore, in a way, this served to extinguish any doubts I had regarding the best way to complete work. I feel that this learning experience is incredibly relevant for me as in less than a year I will be graduating and joining the workforce, and I believe I will be able to apply that conversation to my entire career moving forward.