I started my week flying back from a wedding in Atlanta to find that Syracuse has seemingly jumped forward in time, from a lush green forest to one in the midst of fall, all in the span of a weekend. I found myself using my new understanding of non-profits to engage in meaningful conversations with people around the city. For example, I took a Lyft with a gentleman who wanted to set up an organization to provide sanitation services in rural Ghana, and I was able to direct him to information sources and centers in the area that I had learned about in my classes. On Saturday, I met members of a local foundation doing a “Hot Dog Donation Drive” to raise money, and I was able to learn about their organizational model using language from recently-assigned readings.

Driving through town with the leaves crackling beneath my wheels, I could not have predicted how wonderfully all my work would coalesce and build upon itself over the course of the week.

• My Monday started with a discussion of choice in Economics for Public Decision-Making: how can we capture what options and decisions are better or worse for an individual agent?
• In my Non-profit Management class, we discussed the importance of strategy in defining how an organization plans out individual programs, and touched upon evaluation criteria: how can we share the information about our program’s success or challenges in a way that best equips stakeholders to make appropriate decisions?
• In my Global Civil Societies class, we looked at Faith-Based Organizations, and how they choose to combine their beliefs with their service. That grew into a conversation on: how does the identity of an organization impact the decisions they can make, both for the better and worse?
• In Statistics, we were looking at probability and binomial distribution. What is the probability for a given outcome for your decision? What can happen if you make multiple decisions?
• In Data-Driven Management, we reviewed visualization techniques: how can you show the relationship between decisions and outcomes in a way that makes sense to a casual reader? What should we consider when deciding on a narrative to convey?
• As part of my research, I am working on improving analysis of the tax returns of non-profits. I have been struggling to find documentation from the IRS, but a good decision by the professor allowed us to find precisely the documentation that we had been hunting for months.

All of these classes and opportunities discussed the consequences of one’s decision. Some focused more on how to predict decisions. Others looked at the consequences of decisions on our ability to help people and make a difference. And finally, I was reminded once more how taking a risk or making an unexpected decision can yield marvelous outcomes, even in the most seemingly-mundane of situations.

I never expected as I started the week that I would learn so much about decisions this week. And as I find myself at the end of the week, looking back at my experiences the weekend prior and during the week, I am reassured that my decision to come to Maxwell was the right one.