System Thinking

In my system thinking, I broke down iEFX as a system funneling down to us. Obviously I started with iEFX, but it has everything it is from the university, cause frankly, without the university iEFX would not be around. From the university I went down to the faculty and administrators. These are the people who organize pretty much everything with iFoundry. They help design the program and what benefits they expect to gain from it. They answer the questions. They find the purposes. The administrators and faculty try to find new ways to challenge students to grow and develop new skills for engineering. Below the faculty and administrators come us. Even though we are at the bottom we are still the key component, we are the focus of iEFX. Those above us to succeed give the students the opportunity to succeed Following the students are the results from iEFX. All that we benefit and what we will accomplish are based off of what we learn here. We are gaining critical skills to be engineers that fit in the new society and generation of engineers.

While doing this exercise, I realized something interesting. I placed the system into a hierarchical system from the university down to we the students. But after drawing it out, I noticed that the space between each level is not very far. What I mean is that the bottom is not too far down from the top. The students are given unlimited freedoms from those in “charge.” Thinking back to our first iTeam meetings, I can recall iSA’s saying, “We will do whatever you want. You guys are free to do whatever.” In this sense, we truly have a large portion of the power in the system and I found that really fricken sweet if you think about it.