As freshman class
president my first year in undergrad, my team and I decided to plan a Freshman
Class Trip. Although the trip was
successful, bringing a sense of unity to our class for the next three years,
none of us were prepared for the work it would take to plan the trip nor the
unexpected budget expenses and bureaucratic tape we would encounter. For example, we knew that we could use the
collegiate vans to transport our classmates, but we did not know that we would
be charged per mile in addition to fuel costs.
Also, we knew that we had to have a college employee to supervise the
trip, but we had no idea that professors wouldn’t want to spend time away from
their families to be with a hundred and fifty college freshman. It sounds ridiculous now as I type this. We were short sighted and inexperienced. At the time, we simply used our extra student
government funds to cover the budget costs and begged, bribed, and pleaded our “cool”
professors to chaperone our trip.
I learned quite a bit from this experience. Most importantly, I learned the importance of
gathering all the information before committing to a project (Greer, 2010)
(Portny, et.al., 2008). Had our team
researched thoroughly, rather than assuming what we “knew” to be true, we would
have made better choices with our limited budget and we would not have had to
scramble at the last minute to piece together the trip we had promised.
References
Greer, M. (2010). The project management minimalist: Just enough
PM to rock your projects!
(Laureate custom ed.). Baltimore: Laureate Education, Inc.
Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S.
M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B. E. (2008). Project management: Planning,
scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons,
Inc.
