through trade books the various costs to transport goods by truck from one location to another. To research the costs of airline transportation and the costs of “piggy backing”, I discovered that the New York State Library of The Transportation Department of New York State was located in one of the buildings of the World Trade Center. I visited this library and was thus able to compile all the costs necessary to include in my assigned area of the group marketing project. It was taught during this era that marketers focus on one attribute of a product, to sell a product. Two of the reasons given for this concept were that too many attributes of a product promoted, would confuse the individual. There was also the idea of shared business between competitors, based on each competitor focusing on one aspect (market niche), of like products. For example, in 1980, in selling a tooth paste, one marketer would focus on cavity prevention while another marketer would focus on bright, white teeth. Today, many benefits of a product are sometimes promoted to appeal to all possible perceived needs. In the above case, today, one marketer promotes cavity prevention, tooth whitening, breathe freshening, germ fighting, etcetera, in selling a tooth paste. Other projects assigned to students required a marketing revitalization campaign for common existing products whose sales were in decline. These students reports were presented orally and some were very innovative and impressive. A short time later, through public advertising campaigns in print and televised media, I saw two of these almost exact marketing campaigns being used by the manufacturers of the products that students had reported on in their oral reports months earlier at the university. I enrolled in a one credit course to provide for the one needed business credit to graduate. This course was a weekly seminar style course where students listened to and took notes on the discussions of chief executive officers of corporations. Each week a different chief executive officer was scheduled to discuss a business topic. One chief executive officer, who worked for a major food products corporation, discussed keeping costs low and managing to excel within a thrifty budget. This executive claimed to live this corporate philosophy in the executive’s own personal life and provided one example of this philosophy by driving a small, compact, economy car.
In the last semester of school, I pondered the idea of pursuing a degree in law at this university to help rectify injustices in the legal system, and believed that I would be admitted to law school based on a good grade point average. Discussing this idea with my parents, mother stated that jobs in that profession were scarce due to an over abundance of attorneys and further stated that they would not be paying for additional schooling. I contemplated obtaining a student loan to pay for the law school tuition but decided against this when realizing the amount of debt that I would incur upon graduating.
Because I commuted to the university and did not live in an on campus dormitory, I was less involved in the social “scene” and other occurrences at the school. One day, I heard sirens and looked to where these loud sounds were coming from. There were at least two fire trucks parked in front of the university dormitory. I expressed my concerns about the safety of students living on campus and their possessions to another student who lived on campus. I was told by this student that dormitory fires are frequent enough, so there was no need to be alarmed.
On a cold cloudy December afternoon, I drove into a parking space in the parking lot of the university thinking about a project presentation due when news was delivered by the car radio that former Beatles