Decision making experience & analysis
I would like to start by highlighting the fact that I am a 22-year-old senior. I am currently studying finance at university. I do not have any experience as a manager as in all my experiences I was merely an intern. However, I do have an experience with a major decision as I switched my faculty from the faculty of engineering to the faculty of financial and management sciences.
Let me first introduce you to a concept in third world countries to understand why this was a major decision. In third world countries going to medical school, pharmaceutical or engineering is a major thing; they are treated as top schools in the country and society due to several cultural factors.
With that cleared, let me explain the situation. I was just out of high school with a high grade so subsequently, I was somehow forced to try engineering even though I didn’t want it. I wanted to study business even though I had had never studied business subjects or even had the slightest idea about them.
During my first weeks in engineering I didn’t feel comfortable and this the first indicator. I had a gut feeling that I do not belong here and I do not feel comfortable. At that moment I started to effectively calculate my other options and use rational decision making by identifying my problem which was where to go if I became unable to continue in this track then started establishing my criteria such as passion for the track I am going to choose and salary, then I generated several alternatives including staying in engineering and also leaving it for business. In the end, I decided that I will complete a full year in engineering to obtain the full experience and have the most information as I had a lot of unknown variables during my analysis as variables just broke into other variables.
Accordingly, I persevered until 2 weeks before my midterm exam. During a lecture, I had an epiphany and decided this was it. It might appear that it was an intuitive decision making but it was actually more of a boundedly rational. I believe the process was a mix of the three frameworks, but the decision was made by only 2.
I just had a gut feeling that this was enough and I don’t see myself doing this (intuitive), and I found out that it is impossible to obtain all information and make a proper scenario analysis, it was impossible in my case as I had a lot of unknowns and again variables broke into other variables. This mix of uncertainty and ambiguity made it impossible to use rational and had to resort to boundedly rational and satisfice by adopting the first acceptable solution.
Using this mix of intuitive and boundedly rational was a spot on. I had a gut feeling and investigated it by using an extensive and analytical approach which resulted in me making my decision early instead of waiting for a full year to pass by and lose more time. It may not be the optimal option but it was the first acceptable one. However, it turned out to be the optimal one in my opinion.
If I had chosen the rational decision-making framework, I would have had the challenge of wasting more time, trying to find more information, and spend a lot of time analyzing it. In contrast, I could’ve found a better option or stayed in engineering, and who knows might have had a successful career there but I cut it short.
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