Will the Game change

http://nyulocal.com/wp-content

The game of baseball has stayed the same for many years.  No major changes have been made since there has been replay added to the game just two years ago.  Aside from that it has stayed the same.  Maybe it's time for a change.  One for the better of the sport and not the players.  Over the past few years the sport has been losing lots of its popularity as its becoming too slow for the american public.

Summary- McDonald's profitablilty

My essential research question at the beginning of this passion project was to understand what affects the profitability of McDonald's.  I was interested in this topic because a friend of mine's dad recently lost his job after working with the company for over 10 years. When he talked about it he said "McDonald's really isn't doing well right now" which was surprising because they are everywhere.

www.chicagotribune.com

        Throughout my research process I have uncovered the the relationship between McDonald's and their customers. McDonald's is the most popular fast food restaurant in the World. With over a billion stores and counting, minor changes to the business model results in changes of thousands of dollars. There are many factors that determine how the franchise will stand in the constantly changing business world. Since 2005 McDonald's has seen an increase in nearly 10 million dollars annually.  Part of this growth is accredited to the healthier menu options.

         Through thousands of letters and complaints McDonald's finally answered the demands in bringing breakfast to the all-day lunch/dinner menu. Deemed a "no brainer" , McDonald's had been holding out for the extreme makeover for years because it seemed that costs would out way the benefits. Through just one week of the menu change has resulted in a 4.5 percent increase in daily revenue. This new move comes after the chain hit its lowest quarterly growth in the past 3 years.

           For years McDonald's has been at the helm of fast food industry due to their inexpensive, quality food. However, the luxury of getting a burger on the run is a fad that has seen its end in an age where subway and Chipotle control the fast food market. McDonald's has began a transition to an intensive approach that includes table service and a thicker patty. In the article "McDonald's Beefs Up Its Range with a Meatier Mac" author, Saabira Chaudhuri, discusses the businesses new approach to fast food. 

      McDonalds has implemented many changes in the past year in an attempt to re attract the customers whom have supported them for years. 

What Matters More

This fall I was applying to a handful of colleges, and it seemed like for at least a little while, my whole world revolved around the stressful admission process.  Coming from a well-off suburb of Chicago there is a lot of pressure placed on students to attend highly selective schools. This got me thinking about why there is so much emphasis on the college you attend? I wanted to know if the school you attend makes a difference in overall success in life? So over the past few months I have researched the areas of success in terms of financial, but also overall well-being, the preconceived ideas about the name of schools and the benefits of a college degree.

Where you go to school does not necessarily determine financial success. More selective schools do, on average, give people a better chance at financial success.  The “Ivies” do attract big name recruiters, and have some of the world’s top professors, but according to the Forbes article, “Do Ivy League Schools Still Matter?” a degree from an Ivy League school mostly raises an employer’s perception of that person’s initial performance. Typical graduates that attended an Ivy League school earn more than twice as much as people who went to other schools.

Does attending a selective school generate higher earning potential and is the benefits of getting a four year degree outweigh the burden of debt? College graduates on average have higher employment rates, larger salaries, and better interpersonal skills than someone with just a high school diploma. The demand for quality college education has increased; the modern job market puts a lot of emphasis on degrees.  People who attend college have a far better chance at finding a job and being “successful” in life.  The earnings a person receives with a bachelor's degree still trump the student debt in most cases. “When you add up the premium that college grads benefit from, which can amount to upwards of $10,000 each year, and multiply it by a career that lasts for about 45 years, the cost of a college education is well worth it.” says Carnevale.

Success after college is determined by your personality as well as ability to communicate, negotiate, and lead.  All these characteristics are who you are as a person not the school you attended.  There are numerous examples of people attending average schools and achieving great financial success and it had nothing to do with the name of the school he or she attended.

The college you go to for the most part does not matter as much as the types of experiences you have while you are there.  This is true for not only your experience while at school, but also the overall satisfaction with life after graduation.   This made me think, what was it that people are looking for from a higher education other than just money? People go to college to obviously earn a degree so they can get a job, but there is so much more that goes into a college experience. People grow and really find out who they are as people.  In all my research the following study confirmed my intuition that there was something more than school reputation or earning potential that matters in life… According to the Gallop Purdue Index served 60,000 college graduates of all ages on their success not in dollars but, instead on engagement in their jobs and overall well-being.  The index measures success not in dollars and job titles but in graduates’ engagement in their employment and, separately, their own well-being, as determined by their reported satisfaction with five dimensions of life: their relationships, their physical health, their community, their economic situation and their sense of purpose. The study uncovered four key activities or experiences that had lasting impact after graduation and drove higher engagement at their jobs and overall well-being.  If graduates did any one or more of the following during college 1) developed a relationship with a mentor 2) engaged in a semester or longer project 3) participated in a job/internship that related to the field they were interested in 4) got deeply involved with an organization or cause there was a significant difference in their scores on the well-being index.  An additional factor mentioned was being a part of a diverse community, which was a deeper belief in their specific school as a unique place. 

My overall conclusion after learning about this topic is that you should chose a college that is a good fit for you and not worry about the name of the school.  Because a person’s success comes from within not the school he or she attended. 

http://www.radioone.fm/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/successful-man.jpg

There are many factors that will and won’t determine a child’s success. I’ve learned that one of the most important factors is money. For most adults, money is a huge incentive in what jobs they decide to do in the future; in adolescents the presence of money in their life factors into the job that they are hired for in the future.

In my second blog post I talked about a doctor who had high ambitions of winning a Nobel Award but after a reunion with colleagues, he learned that several of his peers who weren’t as smart as he was earned a significantly higher paycheck than he did. Upon hearing this he switched specialties to earn more money instead of achieving his goal of the Nobel Award. Aside from just the ambition to earn more money, the present availability of money in the early years of a child’s life is vital and can affect their future. Research has found that “Children in lower income families have worse cognitive, social-behaviour and health outcomes.” The saying goes: money can’t buy you happiness, but the absence of money definitely will not grant you happiness whatsoever. If you aren’t content with the amount of money you make from work then it’ll be difficult to become happy. Those who live in a family with low incomes tend to fare worse than those with money.

Aside from money, I researched about the effects extracurricular has on the child’s future. What I found was that the amount of activities a child participates in has no correlation with their success. Although I had no prior confirmation of this knowledge, I always assumed this to be true. I didn’t take part in many extracurricular, but I played the violin for 10 years and what I’ve learned from that time has taught me much more than what I could learn from doing a multitude of activities all at once.

Does Music Dictate Our Emotions? Studies Shows, Actually, That It Does.

What is it about music that moves people? The lyrics we connect with? Although it may seem the obvious answer, because music is a form of poetry, but lyrics might not necessarily be the cause, according to Mark Changizi, who discussed how music affects our emotions in his article "Why Does Music Make Us Feel?". He recalled that as a young man, he loved to listen to French instrumental programs, even though he didn't speak a word of French. This is because "speech sounds alone, stripped of their meaning, don’t inspire". In an experiment conducted at the University of London, 30 subjects were showed a series of happy or sad musical excerpts. Then after listening to the snippets, the subjects were shown a photograph of a face.  "Some people were shown a happy face – the person was smiling - while others were exposed to a sad or neutral facial expression. The participants were then asked to rate the emotional content of the face on a 7-point scale, where 1 mean extremely sad and 7 extremely happy. "

Source: www.all-science-fair-projects.com

"The researchers found that music powerfully influenced the emotional ratings of the faces. Happy music made happy faces seem even happier while sad music exaggerated the melancholy of a frown.  A similar effect was also observed with neutral faces. The simple moral is that the emotions of music are 'cross-modal', and can easily spread from sensory system to another." Music differs from plain speech in our brains, and has a more drastic effect on our mood, especially when it comes to influencing our decisions like it did with the 30 subjects of the experiment.

The author also explores the idea that maybe music is so nice to listen to because a lot of the time when we're listening to music, we are the most connected to it when we're watching it. What kept the author so into the show was not the meaningless French, but the young actress who sang it... "The show was a pleasure to watch because of the humans it showed, especially the exhibited expressions and behaviors." And it only makes sense, humans connect best with other humans. It's just our nature to form bonds with one another.

In my next blog post, I plan to further explore the emotional effect that certain genres of music have on certain people, as well as the physical benefits of music on our brains.

The Post for the Lazy People - Summary Blog

itsfunny.org

The research of my topic went beyond much more than what I originally intended. I picked the topic of "stock market" because that was what I was generally interested in. I'd been researching stocks for a couple months and thought that this project would provide a great opportunity to do more research on what I love. Never was this project overtime consuming or worthless, and I actually thought that this project further enlightened me about my career. Business can be a difficult field, especially if you don't know what you're talking about. But my past blog posts have really helped me understand how the stock market works. Some of my sub-topics were; Market trends, dividends, shorting stocks, the and the RSI Index. Although all of these topics can be confusing, my research and hopefully my blogs made things much more clear for me to analyze. The topics just have become more business vocabulary that will be good for the future. I look forward to applying my knowledge to my college courses and impress all of them with what I know!

Jeremy Lesauski

The End?

http://www.sherlockholmesmystery.com/

I have learned many things during my time researching my topic. My original question started out as just ’What affects what people buy during different seasons?’ and quickly took a drastic turn to talk about sales and how to buy something worth it. I have learned that many people online write post or articles that tell you when the best months are to buy things, but don’t explain why. I’ve learned that you can get cheap airline tickets simply by looking at them in incognito mode and I've explained my personal process in buying items i’m not 100% sure on. I’ve even learned that my overall question, is more common sense than a question and that you just need basic knowledge to actually tell when to buy products, but it definitely helps to know some economics because then you can understand it and actually know why it happens. I think, most importantly, I’ve learned that people are psycho when it comes to Black Friday, i’m kidding, it’s not the most important, but it is the most surprising. Most importantly, I’ve learned that there are many people who write about how to “cheat” the markets and buy things cheap, but companies aren’t dumb, they don’t live under rocks with no access to internet, they can see all of these posts and easily change prices to invalidate their arguments/articles. This ended up raising more questions for me than it answered like; maybe these authors are really just writing these for the companies and they are making the reader want to buy goods of season, and those prices are really higher than in season. Maybe it’s all some conspiracy, like the Illuminati.  I don’t know, it just seems like companies would do something about it because it technically means they are losing some profits if people buy things when they’re cheaper, or it just means they change the time they raise prices so it’s flipped, I guess i’ll never truly know because I don’t see myself going into any career related to this, but, I can always wonder.

In the end, I learned many interesting things related, and not even remotely related to my topic, all of which were worthwhile. I look forward to applying my somewhat new found knowledge to my own purchases. And I am absolutely never going Black Friday shopping, ever.