Reflection 3- What I have learned

            So far for my learning blogs, I have written about what I have learned about myself and about some of what I have learned in class. My first learning blog was focused on my transition from D-1 student-athlete to normal student. Like I mentioned there, I wouldn’t trade my time with the TCU Cross Country team for anything, but I am happy with my choice to leave the team. In my other blog, I focused on some of the things that I learned in my supply chain class that I will probably use in my career. Just recently, I was asked to interview for a logistics job near my hometown, which would be fantastic because I would like to stay at home over the summer if possible.

            For my third learning blog, I think I’d like to continue discussing some of the interesting things that I have learned in class that I can hopefully apply to my life, either in my career or otherwise. Also, I’m a bit scatterbrained, especially with finals coming up, so I will probably jump around a lot.

            This semester, I took a class on financial management. Basically, the purpose of the class is to teach us the basics of simple investments. We learned a bunch of financial ratios that we can use to evaluate a company to determine if its stock is something to invest in or not. We also learned about the cost of capital, or the cost of borrowing money to finance various ventures. Different forms of borrowing carry different tax rates, so you have to keep that in mind while making a financing decision. You also have to think about how long the borrowing term will be. Different lengths of time call for different forms of financing. Lastly, we learned about the time value of money. Basically, less money now can still be worth more than more money a long time from now. All though I don’t intend on going into the finance industry, I think I can definitely use some of these tools in my life. I intend on investing in the stock market, so these ratios and other tools I have learned about will help me evaluate which stocks to choose.  Wow that was a long paragraph. And it probably bored a lot of readers. Sorry about that. Finance isn’t for everyone.

            Next, I took a Microsoft Excel class this semester. As it turns out, Excel can do a lot of things other than simple pie charts (as an elementary, middle, and high school student, that was pretty much all I ever did in Excel). One of the more important things it can do is sort through a ton of data and retrieve the stuff that you want. For example, if you have a table of a thousand different products, but your only looking for the ones from a specific factory or whatever, you can use filters to find them easily. It’s a lot easier than reading through a ton of data one line at a time. I will probably be dealing with a bunch of data in my job, so I will be able to use this tool to search through the data quickly.

            Ok I think that’s all for now. I’ve got more coming, though. I hope I didn’t bore anyone with some of this technical verbiage. Excel and finance can be kind of dry sometimes.