Better Understanding With Classes

Before attending San Francisco State University, I attended Skyline Community College. As mentioned before, I took a Career Planning course that helped me decide to major in Business. Since then I have been taking the required classes to transfer into S.F. State, besides my general education classes, such as Financial and Managerial Accounting, Micro and Macro Economics, Business Math Analysis, Statistics, and Introduction to Business Information Systems. These classes were like the background of the parts that create the business world.

The Accounting classes were like budgeting the money and the allocation of money, while the Economic classes were about trading whether it be within our own country or outside in the world to other countries. For the Math classes, they were means of analyzing raw data of samples from a population. As for the Business Information Systems class, it was about learning how to use Excel to organize information – creating tables, charts, graphs, etc.; and we also had a little lesson on how to create a basic website using different softwares like Adobe Dreamweaver. All these classes helped to prepare me for my core classes at S.F. State because in each of the classes I have taken at S.F. State utilized what I have previously learned.

The main classes I have been able to utilize my learning at S.F. State were Information Systems for Management, International Business and Multicultural Relations, and Marketing Research. In my Information Systems class I learned to create a business plan for an application with a team using the Excel program. With the data in the Excel program, we transferred that data into the Access program to create relationships between the different categories in our application. This application is like a mini database for ease of use. For my International Business class, it was like Economics but expanded with more details for working outside one’s home country. With my Marketing Research class, statistics is being used to determine if a certain product or good is successful for a target market and analyzing its effects on a population. I am currently working on a Marketing Research project, trying to solve a problem on how to strengthen a certain company to better compete.

Now, all these classes that I have taken and currently taking translates into one other class that I am currently taking which is Advertising Theory and Practice. I am also working on another project for this class with a team acting as an Account Planner. The project is practically like my Marketing Research project, but more about advertising and helping to create an ad. The Account Planner does not exactly create the ad, but sets up on what the ad should contain for the Creative Team to design and execute to reach a target audience.

The Art Director is part of the Creative Team. In my previous blog I already mentioned what an art director does. How each of these classes help toward a possible career in art direction, is learning how to reach a target audience. The details that market researchers and account planners do help to make a sort of layout for an ad, to stand out amongst thousands and draw people to it. All the other business classes relate to every field in business and is not so specific to just one career – learning to communicate with others, working with a team, reaching outside the home country, using similar programs to organize data, etc. The business world is mostly full of critical thinking and reaching out to a target audience.