Final Blog Post

            Throughout the fall semester, my group was in charge of tracking and covering the European Financial Crisis, specifically in Greece. We mainly covered how the economic crisis was affecting the citizens of Greece and what actions the leaders and politicians were taking in order to reestablish stability for the country. Furthermore, as a group we also followed quantitative facts and updates to observe if there were any positive improvements in the financial crisis. We attempted to track and form a pattern of advancement from the previous years. Lastly, with the information we found through researching, I tried to form my own opinions and stance of how the European Financial Crisis in Greece will shape up to look like in the future.

            The research and collaboration for each week’s post did not go as well as I had planned or expected. I always had an idea that group projects can either go well or be a complete disaster. Members of the group were not able to meet up at the same time or place every week so we split it up so two or three members were designated to work on that week’s blog post. Problems and tension soon arose between group members because some members were not posting blog posts in time or at all. Working as a group definitely influenced our approach to this project because some members wanted to research more about how corruption within the Greek politics was affecting the EU crisis and others wanted to focus more and approach this project on how it was affecting people on a global scale. However, at the end, working in a group did benefit us because we were able to take many different approaches in order to make better, more interesting blog posts. For each week's post, I did research on the current events of that week and then chose the most interesting or the event that popped up the most to analyze. I used BBC, other European news sources, and twitter. 

            I not only learned a great amount of information about the European Financial Crisis in Greece, but I also learned a lot about working in a group. At the beginning of the semester, I chose this topic because I have always loved traveling to Europe and so I wanted to learn more about how the European financial crisis is affecting the people living there and if there are any effects, it might have on tourism. I learned a lot about the continuous, yet slow recovery process of the EU crisis in Greece as they are constantly asking the IMF and EU for loans in order to pay back their debts. I learned that previous politicians were corrupt and have caused stress between the citizens and the government. As far as what I learned about working in a group, I was reminded how huge of a challenge it is to evenly split the amount of work and effort between group members. Something I did not expect and made me uncomfortable was when a group member criticized my work and effort. I thought working together in a group was to learn how to help each other work to each of our best abilities and not question or demote a student’s competence.