Final Reflection

This semester in International Politics, my group's blog was on the economic crisis in Europe, specifically the issue in Greece. We learned the timeline that the crisis took place, and the factors that made it disastrous. We then started studying deeper into the chaos in Greece, looking at specific issues and problems, such as corruption of public officials, and poor decision making from the government officials.
Our group was divided into turns of who would write that week's blog post. Since people had other priorities sometimes we would generously take someones week if they had something to do. However, some people took advantage of that generosity and abused it, and some of our group members did not contribute anything, nor did it seem like they were interested in helping. We would ask one another what topic we did for that week, and try to avoid doing the same one over again. In the end I think (those who did work) did a very good informative job of making the blog posts.
I've learned a great deal about the economic crisis in Greece, while I I may not be able to understand what Wall St. tells me, I was able to find articles that were able to break down the complicated economic terms into understandable layman ones. I also learned that people should also not be trusted by their word, because most of the time they will let you down.

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.

As the year comes to a close, Greece has been working to revise their budget plans to submit to Parliament for review. Not only does the plan show signs that Greece’s economy may be heading out of the recession, it also shows that Greece will have one of the highest surpluses in the Eurozone, of 812 million euro ($1.09 billion). But of course, this addition of money will be directed towards Greece’s debt payments.

This amount of progress has given everyone in the Eurozone that not all hope should be lost for Greece’s economy. Even more efforts and planning are being made to ensure Greece’s return to its original stature.

Greece has been guaranteed two bailouts since its showed signs of recession in 2010. With the improvements the nation has been experiencing, Greece may not need immediate funding. With this progress, hopes for Greece’s return to international markets are high. If Greece’s economy continues to improve, it may be on the way to pursuing debt relief with the EU.

 

Works Cited:

Kakissis, Joanna. "2014 Greece Budget To Contain No Austerity Measures." NPR. 21 Nov. 2013. NPR. 29 Nov. 2013 <http://www.npr.org/2013/11/21/246492064/greece-no-austerity-budget>.