After my underwhelming pitch this week, I have to admit that I was extremely nervous to give another pitch on a totally separate product after such a quick turnaround. Fortunately, I feel that I improved significantly from my performance on Tuesday, though I was still nowhere near where I would like to be. Occasionally I struggled with pacing, statistics slipped my mind, and I stumbled over words as I became excited. Nevertheless, I feel that our group as a whole gave not just the best pitch, but also the best product to our audience. We did a good job of quantifying success and making arguments for why our product would succeed; the judges were clearly interested by our product, more so than simply as something they had to grade. Stageshare itself interested them, and being able to interest someone through the explanation of an idea is something that is near and dear to my heart.

Wrapping up class was a breeze; the entire structure of the day felt light and free. The concept of process enhancement and its effects on product differentiation was fairly complicated, but never felt daunting simply because we were all so excited to be through the textbook. I was skeptical coming into this class without a background in economics, but I actually believe that I grasped the textbook material fairly well. Systematic thinking is something that comes fairly natural to me, and I think that was a huge help in this case. I do not like to think in terms of independent boxes; I much prefer to think in terms of a whole set of causes and effects. As a matter of fact, it bothered me at times when I would read things in the textbook to the effect of, “this is not exactly an independent variable, but we are going to treat it like one,” though I understand the necessity of such assumptions. In general, I am happy that I was able to push through my initial fear of failure due to a lack of background knowledge.

I am proud of myself up to this point, I am proud of my entire group up to this point, I am proud of the job that the Pittsburgh staff has done up to this point, and I absolutely can not wait to leave for Dublin in the morning.