The Chick Who Could Have Been....

Sometime last week we had quite an interesting experiment happen in our management class. The minute I walked into class I saw a carton of egg, straws, tape, and a huge garbage bin smacked in the middle of class.

While Professor Kurpis waited patiently for the eager class to settle down, he finally spoke and with a voice of a lions might he told the class what was about to take place. As you would have guessed, these eggs were not meant to be eaten, but rather their fates were to be toyed with by our very own hands. The class was divided into several divisions, and each of them were to be given 2 feet of tape, 8 straws and an egg. Now for the most gruesome part, our job, was to create some sort of contraption that would allow the egg to survive a 10 feet drop to its death. We only had 10 minutes to come up with a design and 25 minutes to put that said design into action. To make matters worse there was only ONE scissor to go around and so many eggs to be saved.

Then without a minutes notice and a click from Professor Kurpis, the timer had started, and our Egg's fate to be decided with every passing second. I was quite enthusiastic about this whole experiment, and without a second to lose, I tried to reassure our group that I had a nail clipper that could have been used as a replacement for scissors...until I was ruthlessly turned down by one of our members, who then began to share her idea for the contraption, but little did we know her idea was all we were going to hear about. At that moment all enthusiasm I had for this assignment was lost, and that was how the first step of our planning process began.

While our group was listening to our dictator explain her idea, we all wondered if we had enough resources to even produce this idea of hers. Each of us tried to suggest an alternative or tell her the problems we could be running into, but we were ignored until someone said something she found helpful and thus at that point we all just tried to build upon her idea and gave up finding alternatives...except for I. That was how step 2 and 3 of the process came about. Not too exciting.

At this moment our 10 minutes of planning was up and it was time to place the plan(s) into action. Then with a mighty press of his finger Professor Kurpis started the 25 minute countdown, and our poor eggs came closer to their impeding doom. Each of us immediately went to work, but with so many hands and only one egg, many of us didn't really participate in the production of the contraption. Though we did try to make everyone feel special by assigning them a role, we even went as far as to give someone the role to watch the egg making sure the egg doesn't crack as it sits silently on the table. Oh how time flies with a blink of an eye. The 25 minutes were up before we knew it and it was time to let go of our eggs. As each group got up on the table and nervously dropped their eggs into the bin, some spinning, some misguided, some never even made it. It was finally our turn to go, and as we got ready to drop the egg everyone was baffled by our design, some felt cheated others applauded, but without a seconds hesitation we dropped the egg. Our egg managed to avoid its death but its many siblings did not.

Overall i didn't feel like our group was much of a group, more like a dictatorship, with one leader, and one plan; her plan. I felt it would have been nice if we were able to voice our opinions without being shunned or ignored like we were non existent, but ultimately we managed to succeed, and that's what the assignment was all about. succeeding, not.