Personal Reputation

When thinking about the topic of reputation, almost any of my Computer Science classes and group projects come into mind. This is because my reputation in these classes usually has a negative impact on how I am viewed when teaming up with people. It is not because of any of my accomplishments or personality, but solely because of the fact that I am not a Computer Science major, but majoring in Economics. It is probably better to say that Economic majors have a bad reputation in the Computer Science department than me personally. It is more accurate to say, that any non-engineering students have a bad reputation among Computer Science majors, at least from what I have experienced.

As soon as I mention that I am an Economics student, my group members, classmates, TA's or even professors immediately take a different attitude with me. They automatically assume that I am coming from a non-technical background and start treating me as such. Although after a couple of assignments and working together the playing field seems to level as we get stuck on the same problems and have to help each other out. I wholeheartedly enjoy once we get to this point because we are able to have productive and meaningful conversations, and get to the task of solving the puzzle at hand.

Although during this semester I do have to admit that I have used this 'reputation' to skirt some of my work in my current Computer Science class. As you know for this class we are tasked with developing an app with our group of 4-5 people as our semester project. As soon as my group members found out that I was a non-CS student the pattern was the same. They suggested that I design the app icon and name when we were dividing up the responsibilities. Because my schedule was extremely busy this semester I did not argue and let them take care of the heavy lifting part of the coding process. Because this is a group project, and the professor allows for groups to have non-programming members, who just focus on design, I decided to "cash-in" on this break and still receive the same grade as them. Although coming in towards the end of the project I have been getting involved and helping them out with the coding portion, it is still nice to be able to use my reputation as an Economics major to my advantage.  

Multiple Principal-Agent Situation

For my internship over the summer, I was stuck in more of a pentagon shaped organizational structure, with the responsibility of reporting to 4 different principals for each portion of the project that I was working on. What made this task even more difficult was the fact that each principal had their own view of the project and it was hard to take all opinions into account and please everyone. My direct boss was the Dean of Students of LAS, she was the one who hired me for this project and was in charge of the Student Academic Affairs office. Me and her had a similar vision for the outcome of this project, but did diverge as the project scopes came into view. Because she had many other responsibilities other than the revision of the website, she delegated the task of redesigning the website solely on me. But because the any public content that represents the college of LAS is controlled through the marketing department, I needed to work directly with the person in charge of web presence in the marketing department. Any changes that I proposed to make had to be carefully evaluated by her as well as the Dean of students.

The other two parties that I had to report to and collaborate with, was the ATLAS department, that was in charge of the actual implementation and programming of the website. And the head of the department for which page I was working on at the moment. The ATLAS department acted more as consultants than someone I actually had to collaborate with, but they did come into play towards the end of the project when we were finalizing the pages. I had to make sure they approved any changes that I made, and that they worked out any bugs in my codes. Collaboration with the department heads was a little more in-depth, just because I was working directly with them and translating their ideas that they had for their section, to functioning webpages.

Because of the varying visions for the website there was a lot of disagreements between all parties on how the final website should look like. Unfortunately because I was the messenger between all of these parties, most of the frustration of the design was vented through me. This system of collaboration became so inefficient that actually I requested a general meeting of all parties halfway through my internship, so we can all be on the same page of what my responsibilities are, and what the dream state of the website would be.

Conflict in the Workplace

While working full-time before transferring to UIUC, one of the jobs that I held for about two years was as a security officer at an outdoor mall just outside of Chicago, Old Orchard Mall. My older brother was working as supervisor at the time and was able to get me the job. This type of job attracted a unique array of people which created an interesting dynamic within the workplace. There were full-time students like me and my brother,who were working to pay off some of their classes. There were others who were trying to eventually become police officers who were trying to get some sort of experience. And others who have been working there for years, but have not moved up too far within the company. This combination of different lifestyles did create a an interesting work dynamic.

There was also a lot of conflict because of this and a high turnover rate among the security officers. Another big problem that contributed to many conflicts was the way the security company's upper management was set up, there was little accountability of the supervisors, which gave them a lot more responsibility than they were trained for. When I worked there, there were 3 supervisors, one for each day shift. And for our specific mall we had only an assistant director in charge of security, because the main director was a regional manager and rarely spent time at our mall. Most of the conflicts in the workplace revolved around the inefficiency of this management set up.

A common conflict that occurred multiple times is that the supervisors would play favorites heavily. When ever we would have a call or a situation, the supervisors would always take only specific officers with them and they would be taught about how to handle it. And these specific officers would get a lot of face time with the mall owners and actually learn about how to handle situations. When the officers who weren't favored finally got an opportunity to go to calls, they would not know what to do because of their lack of experience. This was a downward spiral that many officers suffered and was a cause for the high turnover rate. 

I think that because of how the structure of supervisors and officers was organized and the nature of the work, these kinds of conflicts were inevitable. Because we were dealing with sometimes dangerous and emergency situation, it was hard to properly train all officers without actually having them to experience them firsthand. Because of this there was a big gap in knowledge between the favored and un-favored  officers. But I do think that if the supervisors were a little bit more aware of this problem, many people would have stayed at Old Orchard Mall and there would have been a lot smaller turnover rate.