my experience with organizations

My experience with organizations starts with my first job, a lifeguard at Northwestern University. While I was working there was a manager switch, which was that the head of the lifeguards switched jobs into another program within Aquatics. This was a difficult change even though I was a new worker, since I had to learn a different management structure. I feel that even though I was a new employee, it was harder for me to get used to working at a new setting and learning a different supervisor and their management methods. The structure of the organization was there were over 20 lifeguards, which are under 3 “head guards” and the head guards are underneath the true Aquatic Manager, which was the where the change occurred.  This structure isn’t very complex, but since there was a change in the upper level manager, it pushed the employees (lifeguards) to really work together to learn the new management structure. I feel that although my organizational change wasn’t as important since I was a lifeguard, but it meant I had to learn other ways of providing care and the nuances of the new manager.

Just like most other high school students I wasn’t set on going to one school and sent out many applications to see which school I would fit into. My final choices came down to U of Michigan, UIUC, SMU and Miami University (Ohio). This in fact is a transaction cost because I had to choose one of the schools at the cost of declining the other schools. I feel this transaction cost is very familiar to college students because a student might not get into the major he/she wanted to and instead of going into general studies they might go to a different school where the student was accepted into the major of their choosing. This is exactly what happened to me at the University of Michigan because I wanted to go into their business school, however I was accepted into DGS, which helped me to decide to go to Miami Ohio because I was admitted to their business school. However, after one semester at Miami University, I decided that I wanted to switch to Economics, which was out of their business school; causing me to again decide that I should transfer to UIUC because of the improvement in the ranking of Economics. Once again this is definitely a transaction costs because I chose to give up my friends and my business school spot in order to go to UIUC, where I am an Economics major.  This example of a transaction cost is very relevant because I had to make a very big decision that impacted my not only my academic and social experiences, but tuition costs, adapting to a new environment and time of travel to school. My transaction costs might be different than other students, but I feel like every student had to make a decision which school to go to, major decision, social expectations (greek life) and the tuition costs.