As the largest Atlantic hurricane on record, Hurricane Sandy made quite the impact, costing an estimated $20,000,000,000 US in damages (That’s right, 20 billion dollars…).  Aside from flooding streets, damaging homes, causing fatalities, preventing household electricity and blowing down structures, however, she also caused the first closing of US stock markets since the terrorist attacks of 9/11.  For a brief moment, upon hearing this fact, my rather uneducated knowledge of the stock market lead me to imagine the terrible consequences of such an economic closure.

Forgive me though, it really was just a brief moment.

This closure obviously did not have any large-scale ramifications in the stock market domain, as internet trades and online activity is unpreventable, but it does make for a milestone.  According to an article written in The Telegraph by Richard Blackden on October 29th, “Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, whose main New York offices are in an official evacuation zone, recommend[ed] employees work from home.”  The amount of times this has happened in history can be counted on one hand, and as far as the amount of work these employees really got up to during these few impromptu days off; I’m willing to bet it could be measured in a similarly small manner.

Source Article(s):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Sandy

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9639808/Hurricane-Sandy-US-stock-markets-close-for-the-first-time-since-911.html

I remember back in High School, when faced with the choice of which courses to take for my final year, my school councilor asked me (the cliche): “Well, what do you want to be when you grow up?”  I remember thinking to myself, “I have no idea, this sucks that I have to make this decision now, how should I know?”  The funny thing is, I still don’t know the answer to this question; but that’s okay.

     As I recently was introduced to a man named Tom Dobrzanski, I was able to witness firsthand that I am not the first to be in this state of career-choosing-limbo.  Tom is a Sauder School of Business alumni, who demonstrated that the path to where you want to end up is not clearly marked or easily decided.  He went through the standard 4 years of undergraduate schooling, and he enjoyed his stay, but as he approached the time of seeking employment, he instead chose to follow his heart to music.  Tom and some of his then-current bandmates (a band called Lotus Child) opened up a recording studio.

     I have realized that it is 100% possible to advance through post-secondary schooling with only a general idea of where you want to end up, and also that this idea may change very quickly.  Tom is now involved with his more recent band, The Zolas, and his profession stimulates both his musician side as well as his business-background orientation.  I hope that wherever I end up, I can find myself both passionate about my job and satisfied by its integration of my education.

(The Zolas – The Great Collapse ^)

From an idea to an invention, from invention to implementation, and from implementation to innovative multi-million dollar business, Urthecast has weathered the storm.  This is a Canadian based company that, in a nutshell, is putting high-definition, adjustable cameras on orbiting space-satellites.  But what does this really mean? How is it so unique?  This concept, so simple, is absolutely revolutionary.  With the fusion of social media and the world’s population, anyone can view what is going on in the world from a completely untouched perspective.  They can see what people are tweeting in an area, and they can literally watch the planet as the satellite makes its way around the world.  As a business, this basic idea also has a vast amount of revenue-producing opportunities such as advertisement sales, the marketing of exclusive government viewing rights, public viewing prescriptions, partnerships with companies such as Twitter, and many more.  Wade Larson, Co-Founder and Executive Vice President of the company, presented Urthecast to my classmates and I, and looking around the room during his demonstration I could visibly see looks of bewilderment among the crowd; no one was going to try to sleep through this presenter’s speech.  As ‘[T]he world’s first high-definition video platform of Earth, streamed from space,” I have never witnessed a product with as many possibilities as Urthecast.

(For more information, follow this link)

-Ever since I was a young child I knew that I wished to get a post-secondary education.  Being so young, I’m not sure why I felt this way; I can assure you that as an 8 year old I didn’t know any facts on how having a degree impacts your career possibilities, or that financing a university experience could be very costly.  I think that the pursuit of higher education just naturally seemed to mean going to university, I don’t think it ever crossed my mind not to attend.  However, as we discussed in class recently, what is the actual cost/benefit of pursuing a degree? Philip Finkelstein, a fellow classmate, recently also wrote on this subject, blogging that if he solely had to finance a 4 year university degree, he would not do it in the first place.  If one can get a job right out of high school, and progress their way to a position within 4 years that trumps the starting position they would have received coming out of university with a bachelors degree, which path do you think they would take?  One must take into account that this 4 year degree represents a large investment of time and capital.  I don’t believe there is a concrete answer to this question, as either option cannot be considered ceteris paribus.  So many factors remain variable, and it depends greatly on where the individual wishes to end up.  Personally, I think a degree is the right option, but I cannot confidently advise certain people to make the same judgement.