Things I’ve Learned From Important People

As the 2012 Spring semester comes to a close, I’d like to post about a particular course in which important people took time out of their busy schedules, and money out of their own pockets to fly to Salt Lake City and give a guest lecture to MSIS and MBA students. Wanting to remember the lectures as much as possible, I decided that I would take notes throughout the course, and I’ll share them with you here.

Disclaimer, not all of these are exact quotations, but paraphrases and thoughts I had while listening to these people. 

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LinkedIn Success, a Book Review

Link to Amazon

The Power Formula for LinkedIn Success: Kick-start your Business, Brand, and Job Search.
Wayne Breitbarth. Greenleaf Book Group, 2011. 176 pp.

LinkedIn is a great resource for professional networking, and it is a powerful tool if you know how to use it. The Power Formula for LinkedIn Success is an excellent LinkedIn primer for the social media novice, and it’s also packed full of useful information for the seasoned social media user. It’s also fun and fairly easy to read — I read it in about five hours. The author partitions the topics in a logical way, beginning with being found,  and moving on to creating a good profile, using applications and tools, getting more connections, following groups and companies, and brings it all together with a summary and an easy to use checklist. I’ve written out some notes while reading the book, and I’d like to share them with you as part of this review.

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Admissions Essay, or Why I Like IS

Stock Photo of a PenThere are a few formalities to consider when applying for graduate school. In addition to the forms that have to be filled out, the fees that must be paid, the exams have to be taken, and the letters of recommendation that must be submitted, there is that little challenge of writing a solid graduate school admissions essay (or multiple essays in some cases). When writing mine, I tried to focus on what I could contribute to the academic community, and not on what the school could do for me. I also tried to tell a unique narrative by mentioning the diversity of industry experience I have and service I’ve been involved in. My graduate admissions essay isn’t perfect, and it probably isn’t even that good, but I think it was good enough (I was, after all, admitted). I hope it will help someone out there who might be having writer’s block at the moment.

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Résumé Tip #1

For the first résumé tip of afdc (that’s Adam Frisbee Dot Com), I would like to address something I see commonly: the “boring objective.” Avoid boring, generic objectives like the plague. It’s great that you want a “career in a challenging field” that will “utilize [your] skills and knowledge,” but don’t write that on your résumé. Your future employer needs to know how you’ll contribute positively to the organization.

For a simple alternative, use the “summary.” Here’s how it works:

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Some Thoughts on Information Systems

 

Remington Rand Quiet Riter - Photograph Taken by Myself

Information systems, in various forms, have always been a part of how people communicate, and although historic systems are very different from those of today, their legacy should not be discounted. It is important to remember that without pioneering systems of the past, the systems of today could not exist. A modern information system is defined, according to Jessop and Valacich (2006), as“[...] combinations of hardware, software and telecommunications networks which people build and use to collect, create, and distribute useful data typically in organizational settings.” A broader definition might read “a set of individual components that, when combined, allow people to share useful data.” By the second definition, then, information systems have been around for a very long time because the need to efficiently communicate and collaborate is, arguably, no more necessary today than it was five centuries ago. Both ancient and modern people have devised systems for sending, receiving, and storing useful data.

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