The Final Countdown

As December encroaches, my program comes closer and closer to an end. That means the first of many "lasts." I had my last class this week. Which consisted of all the groups presenting their final projects. The assignment, generally speaking, was to create a product and sell it to a specific audience. The entire presentation was the pitch to that audience. So with each project, we had to pretend to be a different audience. There were pitches of organic stores to young activists, new concepts for a reimagined Hollywood Studios to Disney executives, and a new pair of eye glasses that also make coffee to a room of college sophomores.

Usually group projects are the vain of my existence. But I had been working well with the other people in my group since the beginning of the class. We all worked well and balanced each other out which is why we decided to do the final project together. Our teacher gave us three weeks to work on this because one week was Thanksgiving and she knew we would all be working too many hours to devote a decent amount of time and energy to her class.

So we immediately got an idea into our heads so we had plenty of time to come up with a fully formed product and work out every little detail. We decided to sell a small cupcake shop to Starbucks executives to create a business partnership. We met a few times throughout the three week time period, divided up the work evenly, put together the presentation, researched the Starbucks company, and each baked a dozen cupcakes to share with the class.

When we walked into the classroom we immediately won everyone over because we brought free food but then we got up there and began our presentation. Everyone in the class took their audience role to heart and asked us some really tough questions while in character about our proposal. It was challenging and fun all at the same time because it was something that we had invested a lot of time and thought into and we had an answer for everything.

After the presentation was over the class broke character to give us feedback and they said we were very professional and we had really thought of everything. One of our classmates told us that he used to work at Starbucks and he was really impressed that we had researched that company in order to convince them the partnership was a good idea. And then of course, we got to eat the left over cupcakes. It was a great way to end an awesome class!

I learned so many skills I can use in the real world in that class and I am very grateful that I had the opportunity to take it. It was absolutely worth my time and it was nice to just be able to think creatively with a group of new people that I had never even thought to talk to before that. I have heard nothing but good things about all the Disney offered classes on the College Program and would definitely recommend them to anyone considering whether or not to take them.

Hope you're having a magical day, I know I am!