Synthesis Post

When I look back at my twenty blog posts, I am nothing short of pleased with my findings. I started off not knowing where my business blog would go and I ended up with a narrow focus: supply chain management. As a senior in high school I knew that supply chain was what I wanted to do, but I never knew how to answer people when they asked me what it is. Now, I have a great answer and even some possible places that I would love to work. I know how important it is to be honest, efficient, organized, trustworthy, involved, etc. in the supply chain field. These workers are very important to the way a company is run, how smoothly the transfer of products from one place to another goes, and how the relationships between a company and their supply chain carriers is built. Without a strong relationship between company and carrier, the company may switch from carrier to carrier and the supply chain companies lose business. Because the workers are responsible for these functions, the traits that I mentioned above are expected.

Blogging each week has helped me in so many ways. Not only have I become a more fluid writer, but I have learned more information that I had thought possible in such a short time. The prompted posts helped me to think beyond Google's answers for "What is supply chain management?". They also forced me to step outside of my comfort zone and do a hands-on task, interview a professional in my field, and use documents such as scholarly articles and trade journals. This gives me a little bit of insight into how I will have to step outside of my comfort zone as a professional; I will have to take initiative and pick up the phone to call a client, I will be very involved in the hands-on activities happening on a day-to-day basis around me, and finally, I will have to do research that might take me beyond Google. Beyond reading sources other than Google, I have learned to find the significance... I have learned to find out why I should care and how to take that information and tie it to other pieces of research.
My ways of reading online and text sources have been revised, as well as the way I write. When writing blog posts these past 10 weeks, I have had to ask myself, "Why does the reader care?".  If I can't convince the reader to care then I have not done my job. In the business world, I will need to create emails and reports that are convincing and purposeful. This project has taken my idea of rambling on with facts and numbers and changed it into purposeful research that I can share with all of you.

At the beginning, I came up with ten questions that were my focus for my first week of posts. After blogging and researching for 9 weeks after that, those focus questions started to fade out of my mind... Or did they? When I went back and looked at my blog posts last week I was surprised that without knowing it, many of my answers to my original ten questions had been expanded and explained more thoroughly in the weeks that followed. This made me happy and made me feel like I had done this entire project correctly.

Now, back to the beginning. At the start of this project, it was fairly easy to come up with free posts because I could find articles to further explain supply chain management and its role in a company, but towards the end, it was a struggle to find topics for a post. For these posts I had to take what I had learned from this project, to step outside of my comfort zone, and turn to sources like text and videos to come up with topics. Believe it or not, these posts turned out to be more interesting and purposeful than just basic posts about what my field was. My struggles actually helped me in the end; I benefited from pushing myself to explore other sources that are out there.

I think I did really well with answering the questions in the prompted posts and with providing information that someone interested in supply chain management would find useful. I actually loved the prompted posts because, like I said earlier, I was forced to push myself and find out information in a way that is not as common as using Google. Citing my research and providing links has also made my blog better. I did a good job making sure that it is easy to find where my info is from, and after looking at peers' blogs without citation, it really does make a post look less credible. By doing these things well, I think my blog thoroughly touches on everything it is intended to do; It is interesting, convincing, accurate, and full of useful information and purpose.

The questions that I still have in my field are plentiful, but I am confident that I will be able to answer these questions for myself when I am actually at work in a working environment. Some of these questions are as follows:

1. How stressful is it? (OR, more specifically, how stressful will I find it?)
2. Can I afford to take days off? (Not only in a money-sense, but in a work load sense)
3. Will I, Jessica Filbin, enjoy this profession?
4. Will I, Jessica Filbin, like going to work everyday?

Sure, I could look up versions of these questions and find statistics about how many people like it and how many people are stressed out about it, but that will not help me, Jessica Filbin, to learn the answers for myself. I am looking forward to an internship (hopefully junior year) to become more knowledgable in this field. I am confident that I can go into that internship with a basic understanding of SCM and its purposes and ethics. I love how much this blog has helped me to expand my knowledge, expand my thinking, improve as a writer, improve as a reader, and improve my means of research. I hope it has done the same for you!