Triangle arrangement

I have determined to become a personal financial analyst ever since I chose Economics as my major. I believe this arrangement among personal financial analysts, firms and clients are forming a triangle arragement. Personal financial analysts are the core of the triangular arrangement, connecting firms and clients.

Clients and firms do not always agree with each other, especially regarding with their profits. Clients want financial analysts to work for them as much time as possible but firms want to save their costs and their time in order to maximize their profits. For instance, I have read in a book about financial institutions that financial analysts need about six weeks to find detailed sources in to obtain perfect conclusions; however, firms only give analysts about four weeks to work with a client. In this four weeks, most analysts can only reach approximate conclusions for clients rather than exact results. Some clients are not satisfied with the difference and result in conflicts among these three parties.

In order to resolve this tension, many financial analysts choose to work for extra hours for clients but restrict to their schedules with their firms. This fact might be a big reason about financial analysts always need to be hard working and overloaded. Clients might also be able to pay more money to firms in order to obtain more advanced services from firms and financial analysts.

In my own opinion, I believe there is another way to resolve the problem: set up regulations to regulate both firms and clients. For instance, if there are regulations to decide how many hours in minimum firms need to provide for clients in certain situations. Therefore, there might not be as many conflicts and problems as there currently are.

The triangular arrangement is difficult and confusing. It is possible to implement regulations and make cores to do extra workings in order to resolve the tension.

2 parallel experiences

People who are working together for one goal hold different backgrounds and perspectives; therefore, it is very likely to have conflicts when they are cooperating. I have joined in a variety of activities, both in school and out of school and all of these experiences involve some levels of conflicts in the middle. Generally, I would like to say that most of experiences during my internships were peaceful and fruitful but some experiences in the school with students and friends had more arguments.

During the three-month internship, I hardly had any conflicts with group members and supervisors. I believe the major reason for this fact was all interns appreciated the opportunity to work in the firm and wanted to leave great impressions for others. For instance, when we had different ideas with each other in group works, we tended to illustrate and analyze all points of view before reaching the conclusion. Meanwhile, we were nice to each other. Also, when seniors assigned tasks for us, all people tried their best. I would like to say that we had really harmonious working enviornment. However, I do not believe this harmony has anything to do with personalities or backgrounds; instead, interns tried to perform nice in order to leave great impressions to leaders. The other reason for us to have agreeable working condition was the function of seniors. Since seniors had more experiences and skills than most of our interns, they could resolve small conflicts among us very quickly; therefore, we would be on the right track again.

However, based on my experiences in school activities, I indeed found out that people were frequently engaged in conflicts. The primary reason for those conflicts that I can think of is that students do not care too much about others' attitudes toward them. To be detailed, is seniors in the company do not have good impressions about interns, these interns are unlikely to have opportunities to work for the company again; however, if students are a little bit harsh on their classmates during a group project, the consequence is very small. The other reason might be that there is no "absolute leader" in school activities; students are freely to express their own opinions without any concerns. Therefore, it is more likely to engage in unpleasant arguments in school activities.

In conclusion, I believe different situations influence a lot on whether people would engage in conflicts a lot. Other factors such as personalities, talents and commitments indeed are influential as well.

Share the Marbles

    I have learned about the Game of Marble in my Psychology class and I found it was very interesting at that time. I do not believe that there is any perfect equality in the society since all people are striving for their own profits. It is common that people want to get payments but do not want to much many efforts. Some people are indeed more weathier than the rest of us, in different ways. Some of them gain their wealth from heritage and some of them might earn incomes from hard working. I do not believe that it is fair or efficient to charge the wealth in order to help the poor.
    I have encountered many times from past experiences that group members tried to extract from the most responsible and talented members. I used to be in a psychology research group with several undergraduate students and graduate students and our main topic was "how does the feeling of emotion affect peoples' behaviors". However, our group members came from different areas in the psychology department; therefore, many of us did not have strong backgrounds in this field. We relied on those graduate students who were more expert in the topic. To be detailed, they needed to do most of the research and tests. They assigned readings for us in order to give us more backgrounds about the research area; however, many students even did not do those readings because they believed that graduate students would finish up the research in any way. In the end, we did not complete the research successfully. From this experience, I no longer believe that it was efficient for some people to contribute more into tasks even though they might be at the prior position. If the professor could give all of us more time understanding the research topic and accumulating knowledge, I believed that we could do much better.
    As a result, I believe governments or organizations are not supposed to ask the more capable people to contribute more but given the same share of profits for all participants.

Transfer Pricing on Campus

    In such a big university like UIUC, students are always competiting because resources are limited. For instance, libraries or labs are filled with students, especially during final weeks; dining halls are so crowded that I can hardly find a place to eat; residence halls have limited rooms that cannot allocate all students on the campus. The course selecting system is also busy. Departments arrange times according to students' status: whether they have Jame's Scholar and the number of credit hours. If there is an innovation in our school to have Illinibucks, I think I will buy them because they can make my life easier and more efficient.
    Illinibucks can be used for all things I have mentioned above and some other important aspects, including dining, housing, library facilities, ARC equipments, parking lots and course selection orders.
    I believe that the price of Illinibucks cannot be high. I might be willing to pay a fair amount of money in order to select courses earlier because I can choose better a better schedule and more suitable courses. However, I will not pay much for housings or dinings because I have other choices by eating in other restaurants and living off-campus. I think most of students have similar thoughts with me. If the price of Illinibucks is too high, I might not buy them at all because I do not feel I can get sufficient benefits for my costs. It is also not appropriate to make the price too low. If the price of Illinibucks is very low, most of students will pay for them; therefore, it is still impossible to distinguish students. As a result, it is essential for the school to determine an appropriate price for Illinibucks, incenting but distinguishing students.