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

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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.  

Black Death, I mean Friday

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Black Friday. Arguable the biggest sale of the year, but what is it really saving you? Are you saving the $100s of dollars they save in the commercials? or is it just a ploy to get you to recklessly spend $100s, maybe $1000s of dollars? Maybe it really does save you money, but would you put those sales over your life? In 2008 at a New York Wal-Mart, a man was trampled to death as people poured into the store, no one checked on the man to see if he was ok, and on the same day in California, two people were shot at Toys ‘r Us. I mean really? Toys ‘r Us? shot over a freaking toy. Even as recent as 2013, officers had to shoot a suspect who was dragging a cop behind his truck over in Romeoville, IL. Ok, back to the subject of sales, Does Black Friday really save you money? If you think yes, then you may need to greatly reconsider. Ok fine, maybe there will be the odd deal out there where you really do get an awesome deal, but generally, you get crap for the dirt cheap prices. According to Caleb Denison on DigitalTrends.com, Black Friday isn’t worth your time. He says that usually, if you're getting electronics, you get broken electronics, or something that will break really quickly. He gave an example where he bought two Blu-ray players, from a notable brand, as gifts and within four months, he got calls from both of the recipients that they were broken or it has started having a lot of issues. He compares Black Friday shopping to gambling in vegas, “It’s like gambling in Vegas. The cards are stacked against you.”. Amanda C. Haury of Investopedia.com says that you can be easily tempted to purchase many items, so even if its a good deal, you end up paying a lot because you get a lot. Even though everything is on sale, you end up buying many items you don’t exactly need, so you waste tons of money. She mentions how many people go into a ‘shopping frenzy’ due to many people rushing and competing to get the last items on the shelf. “Black Friday has the tendency to get consumers very excited, and consumers go into a sort of shopping frenzy on the day. Overexcitement mixed with adrenaline and a credit card is not a good combination for keeping a budget intact.”, Haury talks about how over-excited people with credit cards on Black Friday is never a good thing because you may binge buy items and usually, you can’t return many of the items you get. My next post will just sum up what I’ve learned overall.

Revelation

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According to BusinessDictionary.com, the definition of Price Effect is: The impact that a change in value has on the consumer demand for a product or service in the market. The price effect can also refer to the impact that an event has on something's price. The price effect consists of the substitution effect and the income effect. This means that the price of items directly correlates with the consumers demand, as we learned in class, but it also shows that goods are better to buy at times that the consumers aren’t demanding it. I’ve found out over personal experience and research that my overall research question, isn’t really a question at all, it’s more just common sense when you take the time to just think about it. I mean, everyone wants, let’s say, sweatpants for winter, so sweatpants retailers will bump up the price because they know people will buy them. Then, once the craze sort of blows over, they lower them back down because no one's gonna buy them at that price anymore, and that would be the perfect time to buy them. Advertising plays a big role in this process as well. Companies would advertise sweatpants during the prime sweatpants season and make everyone think that they need to get it. Even when they have sales, sometimes they increase the price then add the sale to keep it at what it was before while tricking the buyer into thinking there is a sale. This leads into my next topic, Do sales really save you money, and are you really buying a worthwhile product. I plan to look into sales, Black Friday For example since it is coming up this week.