Week One

Hey everyone! My name is Allison Shebek. I am a sophomore at ASU majoring in Tourism Development and Management. This is my first year here at ASU because I attended NAU my freshman year. The school and town (and weather) were not a good fit for me, so I moved back down to Tempe and I am so glad I did. When I graduate, I hope to work on a cruise ship, or perhaps for a large company such as Disney. I can't wait to get to know you all better and I hope you all have a fantastic semester!

I thought that our first class was very interesting. I was introduced to a lot of new topics that I had never heard of before. I never knew about the policy cycle that policies go through, and how long it takes for policies to go into effect. Before coming to this class, I thought that a policy was just a policy, and didn't realize that there were so many different types, such as distributive and regulatory. Reading Urban Policy Reconsidered really helped me to understand policy better, and how every little thing can have a profound effect on a city. I really liked how the author described people and place as being constitutive of each other to describe how people are affected by their surroundings, and vice-versa. People's attitudes, beliefs, and social status are affected by their communities, and they in turn affect the community themselves. This led to the question of how cities decide how to implement policy, and whether the individuals or the community are what needs to be changed. The policy approach that we talked about in class that really resonated with me was communitarian vs individalism because I was able to agree with both sides' views. This topic really made me think about what view I most closely fit with. I think that shared resources are a good thing, which fits with the communitarian approach, but I also feel that it would be difficult because it would be impossible to decide what's best for everyone. I agree with the individualism approach that free will is important, but I am not so sure that the private sphere should always be more important than the public sphere, so I feel that I probably lie somewhere in the middle between these views. I think that I am going to learn a lot from this class, and knowledge about public and urban policies will be a great benefit to me in my career and my life.