Second Year Reflection

As I look back on my second year, I cannot help but look at the growth that I have made

for my career and furthering my own personal goals. While my first year consisted of my travels

impacting my personal and professional goals, the classes I took during my second year held a

greater impact.

During my fall my semester, the two classes that truly resonated with me were business

law and business analytics 1. These two classes furthered my professional understanding of

how business operate. My business law class helped me understand how business operations

under the law and work with contracts and negligence. It has helped provide a basic foundation

of what mistakes to look out for and what actions need to be undertaken to ensure secure legal

grounds. Law has always been an area of mass confusion for me, so taking this class has been

able to improve my understanding of how the law works and operates in the business world.

We learned the role contracts play in business and when they are and are not enforceable, and

how action can be taken against negligent or tortious behavior. Business analytics 1 also greatly

impacted my professional goals on how industries utilize and are impacted by business

analytics, and the methodologies implemented to be effective. I learned many statistical

methods, vocabulary, and greatly improved my excel skills with the goal of applying what I

learned in the classroom in my professional career in an industry. This semester really began an

in-depth dive into how problem-solving works in industry and what methods people actually

employ to solve problems. These two classes specifically helped my professional goals and

trajectory by providing real world understanding of the business world and how it operates.
 During the spring semester, my classes continued to further my professional goals, but

also improved my personal trajectory as I began to take a deeper dive into my majors and

learned more about the industries I’m interested in working in. Specifically, intro to

econometrics and operations management provided the concepts and introduction to the skills

necessary in each industry and continued to confirm my interest in a career in each industry. In

my econometrics class, we dived deeper in statistics, a topic I find interesting, and learned how

to analyze and manipulate data in the coding system R. While learning this program will be

extremely beneficial in my professional career, the class itself was the most influential aspect as

I continued to stay interested in the topic of economics and learning how to work with the data

collected. Also, my operations management class furthered my interest in the major and field

as I finally began to learn in depth what the major truly encompasses and what the techniques

in managing the operations and supply chain of an industry are needed to succeed. I learned a

lot of interesting supply chain techniques, such as six sigma, the Toyota Production System, etc.

all of which are important to have an understanding when in a full time career. However, the

greatest impact from this class was understanding how organizations manage their supply

chains to keep products and materials moving. These classes were great in learning more about

my two majors and continuing my interest and pursuit of potential careers in these industries.

Reflecting back upon my second year, I can see the growth and improvement in my

professional and personal trajectories as I learned more about both of my majors, their

concepts, and the techniques utilized in each industry. Looking towards my third year at UC, I

hope to continue furthering my knowledge of my majors and the techniques utilized and to

further study abroad as I have done during my first year at school.