End of Week 2

Lights. Camera. Action.

That's the normal cycle. For the past two days, it's been action, action, action.

Before any of the Hotelies realized, Week 2 of Summer College came to an end. Along with that came the due date to our CHESS Individual Report -- a formal business report regarding profitability of our virtual hotel after the first 6 weeks of new management strategies. In order for us to learn the proper ways of putting together the report, we also needed to learn how to use pivot tables in excel to create data tables, charts, and graphs that can effectively represent our hotels' success.

Unfortunately, we were not able to cover how to sort data into the required visuals until Thursday's class. With the final report due by noon on Friday, almost all 80 students in Hotel Operations Management ended up staying after class in order to start their reports. As for Stacy, Louisa, and I, we worked from 3:30 pm all the way until 9:00 pm with one quick excursion out to the famous Collegetown Bagels for dinner.

Most of us expected that the report would be mostly finished after almost 5 hours of quality work time in the lab in order to analyze all of the statistic data and improve the business strategy. However, that was not the case. Thursday night's office hour ended in frantic madness with students scrambling to jot down notes about what they can do after returning back to their dorms. This definitely proved how serious everyone in our class intends to do well in this program and is willing to put in time and effort to achieve that goal.

Despite the lack of time we had to make our report, it is still worth approximately 25% of our overall grade. Louisa and I were decided that it would be in the best of both our interests to stay up late and finish as much of it as we can possibly finish so that Friday's in-class time would be dedicated to fixing formatting and minor writing errors. Therefore, I moved my laptop over to Louisa's room and we camped out for the night.

We came up with a system of taking naps periodically. While I would nap for 30 minutes on the bed, Louisa would be working on her report while keeping tract of the time. After the 30 minutes were up, she would wake me up so I do not oversleep. Then I would return the same service to her. More importantly, we motivated each other to keep on working on our reports.

Before we realized, it was already morning. Literally running on a total of 2 hours of discontinuous napping, we went early to eat breakfast at the Commons and headed directly to the computer lab to squeeze in a half hour of work before our morning lecture. By this time, I had already finished most of my report and I was going back to fix formatting and minor writing errors.

The last half hour before the noon deadline was extremely intense. All of the hotelies scrambled to finish their reports in order to submit it online and print out a hard copy. After realizing the chaotic situation, Professor Mark and Reneta were kind enough to postpone deadline by 1 hour. With an extra 1 hour, I focused mostly on fixing the captions to the 6 graphics I incorporated and I also added an optional title page.

After submitting the report, I felt free but tired. I was definitely ready for the weekend. Immediately after eating lunch at the Commons, I returned back to my dorm for a nice 2 hour nap. I would like to sincerely apologize about not posting a blog entry yesterday night. I will not allow that to happen in the future.

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After office hours on Thursday night, Louisa and I decided to take a quick mental break from the report by going to watch a few minutes of the Ithaca fireworks. Unlike celebrating July 4th on the actual day, Ithaca has a tradition of celebrating 2 nights in advance. I have included some photos that I would like to share:

* The crowd that gathered to watch the fireworks.

*A snapshot of the fireworks.

Also, I would like to include my CHESS individual report. I uploaded my report via google documents. However, I had to save the document in a compatible format rather than the 2007 format. Therefore the formatting of the overall report is changed into different proportions. Despite the changes, I would love to share with everyone the reports that we all worked extremely hard on.

From this experience, I learned the importance of finishing my work on time. It does not matter how long it took me or how late I stayed up, the bottom line is getting it done.