Columbia Panel

Organizational behavior:

Boy, I wish I had been taking notes today, but I was called to be on a panel discussing the Columbia shuttle mission.my name was Don McCormick, I was an engineer for NASA. I was given a piece of paper by brother Holt, it had a script written out for me to read. Previously we were given a CD, a multi-media Harvard case, about the Columbia shuttle mission. On this CD were multiple interviews and videos of the staff at that time. Don McCormick was never interviewed, but he was listed in multiple telephone conversations. As like many other engineers, Don McCormick is not a people person. I had to read from the script that had many pauses and stutters. This is not what I had expected but was very grateful to my lack of reading capabilities on spur of the moment out loud in front of people reading. You would got a kick out of listening to me stutter and pause while I read the script given to me. I truly do love to act. I really felt like I got into it well enough.

Basically we spoke of what the culture was like there at NASA and how a problem like this could have been made to be so overlooked. I felt there wasn't sufficient data to make a call on anything, but my character did in fact say that with the data available there wasn't any risk. What a pansy!

Out of Class:
We had a huge company meeting discussing the future. Jordan Judd bore his testimony, which was nice, but my personal thoughts on the matter are that it made it feel too much like a missionary commitment pattern and too manipulative. I understand that it wasn't, but in this setting, I would have responded better to cold facts about our progress. Oh well, it was nice to hear people's thoughts.