Why I missed my first class in my first week of college
September 9th, 2010 | Small Business | No Comments »So, I just finished my first week at the University of Maryland-College Park.The Entrepreneurial Opportunity Analysis class I’m taking is fun;I learned that altogether Blockbuster is worth about $11 million which, apparently is a two night’s stay at a Daily Inn. I’m finding Philosophy to be difficult and History to be what we already covered in high school(so far).
My schedule’s not too bad, although I could do without the class that ends at 8:45 p.m. However, I missed my first class Wednesday because of the situation in Silver Spring. I have a yr old brother, whose school started yesterday. Since my first class was at 3 in the afternoon, my mother asked me to watch him. So, we started from the house at two and were on the beltway when we hit traffic at a standstill. We turned on the radio(to WTOP) and heard that there was a gunman in the Discovery Headquarters in Silver Spring. Immediately, my mother turned towards Bethesda. Then, we called my father for directions and he told us to take the East-West Highway, which would, eventually,hit Baltimore Avenue. However, the local roads were all congested and since we didn’t know the area really well, we had to rely on my father and the maps that we had in the car for directions. We wound up getting to College Park a few minutes before my next class.
This reminded me of the Crisis Data summit I attended a few weeks back. It’s situations like these where social media becomes very useful. For example, someone could have tweeted saying “Gunman in discovery bldg. beltway clogged. take alternate route”(Yes, this is what I think the twitter post would have looked like, except for the periods; those are mine.) Then, my father could have read it and then called us and, if we hadn’t gotten on the beltway already, we could have taken an alternate route. I anticipate that with smartphones becoming more common, a social media network will become more able to deal with these crises and everyone on that network will be fully informed of every crises that takes place.
