let's talk about capstone: basics

So quick recap - I'm a business major. Finance and accounting. I love them both when they're taught properly (read: I'm falling back in love with finance and generally happier with my classes this semester). At TAMUCC, business majors have this class that is fondly (lol) referred to as "capstone". It's a management class technically, but it combines everything we learned in business core classes. It's a huge, semester-long group project. There are five people in my group - four girls and one guy. I'll say right off the bat that I had my doubts. The guy and I have been friends (or classmates, at least) since I started college, and we were dead set on being in the same capstone group. One of the ladies in the group, I had in a different group project (the first group I ever really liked, actually), so when we found out we were in the same class again, we agreed to join forces. Now we had three out of six (at the time). The other two ladies joined the group, and we were able to be the one group in the class with five people.
Score.
I'm pretty comfortable with the group we have. We all seem to get along pretty well, and we laugh and panic and have inside jokes about falling off cliffs and jumping out of windows. We're only a little bit of the way in to the semester, but our first presentation is tomorrow (ack!) and I think we'll survive.

It starts with Macro Environment analysis - so everything outside of the industry. Demographics, political/legal, sociocultural, technological... things I'm forgetting. It's basically the big picture. From there, we look at the firms we choose to put in our industry. We hit a snag here because we put firms in the industry that didn't belong there, which left us scrambling tonight to fix it. There was also another little hiccup because we looked at the 10-Ks from 2013 instead of 2014 (which gives you 2013 data... as opposed to 2012 data from the 2013 10-Ks). Anyway, all that is fixed now, so it's just putting the powerpoint together and actually figuring out what we're going to say. That'll happen tomorrow morning. The stress will be over in about 14 hours. (Still definitely wanting to panic...)

I planned to write a little more on the actual process of this, but it's late and I'm sleepy. I'll write another post with the things we need to fix after the presentation.

82 days until graduation.