Senior Portfolio Reflection Essay.
In my last three years here at Bridgewater College I have been able to achieve a lot of great goals for myself. I am getting my bachelor’s degree in business administration. I have been on the offensive line on the football team here for the past three years playing every position from left tackle to right tackle. Being at Bridgewater has truly allowed me to learn more about myself as a young adult and also let me pursue my career in football and better yet the business world. I want to continue into my professional career with the knowledge and confidence that I have learned here at Bridgewater during my courses, football, and other groups I was involved in during my last 3 years.
Integration
While in high school I was never a great student academically. I seemed to struggle in most general education areas including science, math, history, and other general studies. I always found myself able to soak in all the information from the business courses and that is where my love and passion for the business came from. During my studies here I have taken many business and communication courses. Reflecting now as a senior I have realized that the overall aspect of the business is truly more important than I would ever imagine. I use my studies in my everyday life at Pendleton Community Bank here in Rockingham County and also when I return home within landscaping incorporation started by an entrepreneur 30 years ago. My communications courses have made me be able to stand in front or even just professionally send emails while being able to express my thoughts and knowledge of certain topics. Communication has helped me move forward in my working environments in both of my occupations. While in the banking industry communication helps with customer service and being able to possess customer relations. These aspects have helped me move from the bottom of the barrel in the landscaping industry to now being moved into the office for a management role. I now use my communication skills as well as skills like marketing, from my introduction to marketing, and use it to be able to listen carefully about what the target consumers want and turn that knowledge into making proposals and delivering it to them with confidence.
Strategic Management and advertising also taught me that there are different approaches to take for different consumers such as high-end consumers, low-end consumers, high-performance consumers, etc. Learning and knowing the importance of what each consumer wants in goods and services and how to get them to become interested. This concept is called marketing orientation. In marketing orientation, there are four main ones that businesses use to gain consumers and sell products. These four include promotional orientation, sales orientation, marketing orientation, and societal marketing orientation.
Knowing the differences in these will help you be able to express your goods and services in any workplace you may be involved in. In my business courses, I was able to see myself grow into becoming the businessman that I have always wanted to be, and that has so far helped me climb through the ropes within my occupation back home. I started in the landscaping corporation being a field technician cutting grass and taking care of simple landscaping tasks, I now am falling into the position of general field maintenance manager.
In artifact number one I wrote my final exam about a business called, Bridgewater Automotive Group. In the paper I explained the business structure, the environment, and the area in which we will represent and produce, and finally, explaining how to make the business become a family because I believe that when a business is a family everybody tends to work more efficiently. Writing this finally allowed me to express my business ideas and allowed me to become the CEO of my own business. This was one of the very few things that allowed me to use my learnings and knowledge from the classrooms expressing it through work.
Engaging With Diverse Perspectives
While growing up I have always lived in a very diverse environment. I grew up in a little city named Hopewell, Virginia. Hopewell, home of the blue devils, was not the best city to live in when it comes to crime. Hopewell’s crime is so high through schools that there are metal detectors that every student has to walk through and a full staff of armed security guards. With all the crime around me, I found my way through sports like baseball, soccer, football, and basketball. My sports career is now the reason for me extending my education here at Bridgewater. Throughout my three years here at Bridgewater, I have gone through totally different diversity yet still a very important journey that has made me have a whole new perspective on certain religious, ethnic, and sexuality groups.
I truly know I made the right decision to attend a liberal arts college because of the amount of inclusiveness and diversity. Bridgewater has done an amazing job when it comes to trying to get all students no matter race, gender, or sexuality to come together as one whether it’s going to a game, bingo nights, or most importantly, to me of course, freshman orientation/ freshman week. Being a part of the football team here has also been an amazing experience when it comes to all races and religious beliefs uniting as one. The coaches have always made an effort to show appreciation and never allow any kind of discrimination or disrespect for anybody. We live by the motto, once an eagle always an eagle. Notice we say nothing about certain races or have to establish that we all accept each other because when it comes to football we are all nothing but family. Throughout these past couple of years there has been some of the countries worst racial division in decades and being on the team has helped with certain teammates being able to reach out and just talk about everything knowing there was no judging. Coming into college athletics I was worried about being the “small fish in a big pond,” and now as a senior, I will leave hundreds of my closest friends.
In the classes I have taken at Bridgewater I feel as if I have grown as a person when it comes to being able to work in a diverse environment. I have had to work in groups of all different backgrounds and also had to learn from professors of all ethnic groups. The professors here at Bridgewater College have set me up for my future by making classes so hands-on and making students work with others no matter their differences. These aspects of inclusion help future adults because in the workplace you will need to know how to work with any individual no matter religion, race, etc.
Public Disclosure
Before Bridgewater, while I was in high school I would volunteer at the local soup kitchens with my football team and we would serve the homeless community in the area. I would also do little league coaching of all sports imaginable. I believe the most memorable volunteering I did in school was when our head coach took me and a few teammates to the local elementary schools for career day to talk about our lives as student-athletes and how we were going to play college football. We would talk about being leaders on the field and in the classrooms and the kids were overall filled with joy when they met us as if we were superheroes.
Here at Bridgewater Coach Clark truly believed in giving back to the community and he was always looking for an opportunity to give back to those that support us whether it was teachers, janitorial staff, cafeteria workers, etc. I remember my first football camp here after one of the practices our conditioning was to mulch all the beds around the football field. It took the team a couple of hours but I will argue that task made the team unite better than any other team bonding we did during that camp because we knew if we worked together we could get it done faster. Even though mulching the field made us all closer I would say my top volunteering events would be dressing up in our jerseys and handing candy out to the local kids. Those kids knew us sometimes because we would always go to the local elementary schools and read to the classes in our jerseys and a lot of the times the kids would come to the games and we would see them in the stands.
In my time here at Bridgewater College, I was faced with Public Disclosure in my entry to communications when we had to do a persuasive speech with a presentation,The Ronald McDonald Presentation , for a charity of our choice. My charity was the Ronald McDonald Foundation. This nonprofit organization helps house families near their sick children that may be in children’s hospitals for a long period. I remember doing the research about the foundation and being so excited to give my presentation during class and after my presentation, I was voted most persuasive and best cause which means the class raised money to donate to my charity. That course opened my eyes to public disclosures and made me realize that I believe I was put on this earth to give back in any way I possibly can. Now every birthday I have I set up a fundraiser to donate to a charity of my choice.
Global Citizenship and International competencies
Growing up I was always fascinated with Spanish culture and language. I play a very high level of soccer and on the team, the majority of my teammates were Hispanic, and English was their second language. While home I work for a landscaping company, Robbins Landscaping Inc., where I am a manager that oversees routes and my crew. My direct co-workers are from Guatemala and El Salvador. I have always taken Spanish courses and downloaded an app that would help us communicate if I could find out how to say certain things in Spanish and I could tell that the more I tried to speak in their native language the more respect and level of comfort they would gain around me. The owner of the company told me once that a lot of my coworkers choose not to speak English because of the discomfort they had pronouncing something wrong or not knowing something so if I at least tried then so would they and that overall built such strong relationships between us.
While on the job I would ask, probably too many questions, because I was so interested in the culture and what they did for fun and just anything that I could make out in a Spanish sentence. It was not until I had to research Argentina in my Spanish course here at Bridgewater that truly made me dive into another culture and research it. In my presentation about Argentina, I show the countries biggest attraction areas and dove into a little about Argentina as a country. This course helped me with truly understanding and being able to interact more with my co-workers and others of different cultures. In the course, we would discuss international countries and their cultures including different foods, music and overall how it is to live in a foreign country.
My two Spanish classes did not only allow me to communicate with certain individuals but the course also helped me with the aspect of communication and how far knowing a second language can give you a step above certain applications and job opportunities. The Spanish community in the United States has become so large and is continuing to grow that certain occupations must be fluent in Spanish to be able to interact with those of that ethnicity. In the business world, I strongly believe that knowing enough Spanish to communicate confidently will allow me to be more versatile in the field and be able to reach out to more consumers or clients.
Ethical Reasoning
This topic is massively important in everybody’s life when it comes to doing things that are morally right or as coaches would always tell us, what you do when nobody is watching. I have lived by that phrase being an athlete for a large part of my life. It was never about what you did while you were on the field but always about knowing that the community around you no matter if you’re in high school or college knew who you were and you had to represent that at the highest level. Being a leader of any group or team we faced adversity whether it was practice or games or even just eating lunch together. We always had to come together as one and overcome the obstacles at hand.
While in my professional ethics course we learn all about ethics within a professional setting. We learn about all different theories of ethics like egoism for example is an ethical theory that says people live in their best interest, whatever benefits themselves is most important. Learning these different theories and philosophies of individuals helps you understand the different moral perspectives and lifestyles. These different theories and having knowledge on ethical behavior in the workplace is so important because in any big industry there is a code of ethics, and if you don’t live by that code of ethics you are liable to be terminated from your position.
Preston Haden's Senior Portfolio 