My favorite part of today was working on our video project assignment. We all gathered around a small table (centered with delicious peanut m&ms) and brainstormed ideas. There was a lot of positive energy in the room, and we were all excited about our ideas. After viewing numerous YouTubes, we created our concept. We decided on combining recordings of drawings on whiteboards, real objects, and interviews. The video will promote the new development in contraceptive methods and is based on Dr. Dorflinger speech “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Additionally, FHI360 is working on creating a biodegradable implants and trying to make injectable contraceptives last a longer duration of time. It has been very interesting to learn about all the different parts of contraception, and hear from numerous different employees on their personal projects. I am very excited to continue story-boarding the transitions between animation and interviewing, and drawing up visuals that will be drawn on the whiteboard. I also managed to eat half of the bowl of peanut m&ms!
Category: Z WEP Archives
Day 3: Fox50 Pt 2
Today I shadowed Steve Elizondo at Fox50 again. We continued to shoot and edit the same footage as yesterday for the FCC. The most exciting moment of the day for me was actually getting to edit some of the shots from yesterday. I did not expect to work hands-on with professional software. On top of that, I learned lots of new tips and tricks from real experts. When we finished edited the video that is being sent to the FCC, Steve and some other team members gave me some other B Roll to edit on my own time. After I finished editing that, I received a lot of helpful feedback which I am sure to take back to my own personal work.
Another entertaining moment of the day was going back to the television towers to shoot a time-laps of the towers and clouds. Before today I had never worked with time-laps on a professional camera, so it was a neat experience and the footage turned out amazing.
DAY 2
I began the day to day by learning that I would be going to a meeting with some of the physicians this afternoon. Though I was a bit apprehensive, I was also excited to see what goes on in true, professional meetings. I moved on to the next step of the Basic Revenue Cycle and started learning about payments and the way that medical bills are sent back from insurance companies. These payments, along with the procedures and patients, come back in a bundle of sorts called an EOB, which stands for Explanation of Benefits. I learned all about what an EOB is and the ways in which insurance companies return them for their patients. Though it was a little bit daunting to see all the names of patients and all the procedures they’d had done, I found this process to be one of the most fascinating so far, as entering the payments and checking the EOB’s is such an in-depth process.
Suddenly, it was 2pm, and I was told it was time to head to the hospital for the meeting. My stomach clenched, as I knew I would be in a room with some very important people making some very important decisions, but I was also incredibly excited. Though I can’t really talk about what was discussed in the meeting, it was intriguing to see the way that meetings at this level are run. Everyone seemed to do a great job handling crises and crunching numbers in rapid-fire fashion. There was a lot going on at once, so it was a bit difficult for me to keep up. However, I still was able to pick up on some things and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Two hours later, it was finally over.
I’m feeling pretty tired as I write this, but I’m excited for tomorrow!
DAY 1
Today, I began the day by learning all about the ins and outs of HIPAA, which is the guidelines everyone in the medical field has to abide by when dealing with patient confidentiality. Because I was eventually going to be seeing patient records, I had to go through a 36 slide presentation about HIPAA and then take a test. As one of my hosts explained with genuine regret, this was government mandated and not their decision. Even though I was promised extremely dry, boring information, I actually found the expectations and origins of HIPAA to be rather interesting, though I did reach a point where I was ready to be done with learning about the Hippocratic Oath and Enforcement Rules and PHI.
Once having completed the test, I was explained the idea behind the “Basic Revenue Cycle,” which is the process in which patients are billed and physicians are paid for their services. I was told that I would be going through each of the different parts of the basic revenue cycle and the respective employees who completed different tasks associated with the cycle.
I sat with two of the individuals who are involved in the first two steps of the cycle for most of the day, and it was very interesting to learn about what it is they do and why each step of their job is so important. For instance, I sat with one of the medical coders, who told me all about the process she goes through for medical coding. In a nutshell, every procedure and diagnosis in the medical field has a code. These codes have to be entered and checked for every patient who comes through in order to make sure they are being billed for the correct procedure, and also to make sure that their medical record is accurate. I very quickly realized how important this step is, because of one of the codes is off in some way, it can mess up the entire system. This made me think of the process as a sort of metaphorical assembly line; if one step of the cycle gets off course, the whole process can be compromised.
I had a great first day and look forward to what is coming!
Day 3: Lions, Tigers, and Bulls (Oh My!) – The Wonders of Baseball and the Chinese Zodiacs
Kid 1: “When I’m 80-years-old —”
Kid 2: “You’ll be a great grandma!”
Kid 3: “No, you’ll be like Margaret!”
I don’t know if it’s just because it’s day three, but today was brutal. Maybe it’s because I’m so incredibly old – although, if I look like this at age 80, I won’t be disappointed, but I digress – or maybe my body is already run down by the rampant onslaught of boisterous children. Perhaps it’s because the school year is almost over, or maybe it’s because lunch starts at 10:45, and that post-lunch sleepiness hits when there are still 4.5 hours left of the day. One student looked at me today (at only 10:00) and said, “I need a nap.” Me too, kiddo, me too.
Even with my sleepy daze, I walked into the classroom thrilled to share a funny coincidence (that’s a fancy pants word as the kids would say) that occurred this week. On Monday, while instructing them to write about a fun time with a friend, Mrs. Cohen gave the students an example regarding a time she went to a Durham Bulls game and caught a foul ball, only to have it taken from her bag by her brother-in-law. By sheer luck, at Wednesday night’s Bulls game, I ended up with a foul ball. Their faces lit up like a Christmas tree when I passed the ball around to them and faced constant questions like “why is it so hard?” and “how’d you catch it with your cast?”
Lunchtime brought me more questions and another lesson for this week. To a kindergartener, age is really just a number. I could be 17, 26, 80, or 152, and it wouldn’t matter. To them, I’m just old. Lunch is where all of this age discussion started. They had me guessing their ages and took turns guessing mine, resulting in some… interesting answers. One student started talking about their Chinese zodiac animal, and suddenly (another fancy pants word), I was the expert because they discovered I study the language.
It was today, specifically, that I wished that these curious creatures we call children would never lose that spark of wonder or urge to be inquisitive as they become old like me. These bright-eyed and brilliant kids keep me on my toes, and I feel so honored to be that old wise one they look up to.
Day 3
Today was my second day at SAS as a part of the Cary Academy Work Experience Program and my time was spent with not only the Corporate Creative team, but also the Video team! At Corporate Creative offices, I was introduced to Mr. Aaron Overington, the Senior Design Manager, as well as many of his colleagues. I thoroughly enjoyed learning about the design process behind their booths and banners for their participation at the Global Forum, a huge conference held annually to showcase SAS. It was super interesting seeing the designs progress from sketches to reality, and the final result always looked chiq. Also, Mr. Overington and his colleague took me up to SAS’s very own printing site, only a few feet from the campus gates. I was told that the printing site will pretty much print anything you want, regardless of the size or complexity of the image – thus, it was an essential tool of the Corporate Creatives. I remember there being a huge, industrial printer which printed the panels for booths and things like that – I couldn’t imagine how much the ink cartridges cost! After my time in Corporate Creative, I was handed over to the SAS Video team whose job is to create any video needed for events, advertisements, or promotions. Mr. Ed Harriss of the SAS Production team showed me around the audio and film studios on the SAS campus, something I never knew existed! I appreciated how passionate he was about his job and his enthusiasm really resonated with me. What I found interesting is that he had been working in the Video Department for 20 years, and technically, he was the last hire of the department!
Day 3
- Today I called Professor Malone who is a country music historian and is mainly involved in country music. I called him to confirm the date in which I would be interviewing him twice, and unfortunately he didn’t pick up, but I got his answering machine which was more entertaining than one might think. His voicemail is actually a jingle, and seeing as I had never heard it before, it was very amusing. It was very long for a voicemail and rhymed and included Professor Bill Malone’s name and had something to do with him being sorry he missed my call. I think it went something like “you have reached the malones we’re sorry we have missed your call/ please leave a message at the beep and we’ll get back to you all.” I assume it was him singing in the track. He was accompanied by a woman, who I assume to be his wife, who was doing harmonies to it which I found extremely amusing, that someone would go to the trouble to write this and add harmonies to it for something as simple as the voicemail on their answering machine. The tune altogether reminded me of a show I saw in Disney World’s Magic Kingdom called Country Bear Jamboree which is a bunch of animatronic bears singing old country/bluegrass like tunes. His tune on his answering machine had the exact same sound. Long story short I left a message and he hasn’t gotten back to me but hopefully he will by tomorrow.
Day 3- Finance
Today started with many warnings that it will be dry. Finance isn’t something that is super exciting they told us, but it was still a lot of fun. We learned about FM, or financial management, a program that SAS uses to monitor the money that SAS spends, like where it is spent, and how much is spent. That was the main conversation for today, but one story was with an audit-person that came to speak with us about his job. I asked if there were any consequences with a company misusing their money, and he talked about a SAS scandal and how many people that were well known were fired and jailed because of him. I thought that accounting was all about math and numbers, but it really is about working with people and the budget, and potentially putting people in jail!
Day 3 – Up Close and Personal
Today was definitely less hands-on than my last two days, as I did not work in the lab at all. Instead, I met with Dr. Depro, an environmental economist (also a senior economist at RTI) to discuss his job and career in economics. After trekking across the RTI campus (I don’t think it was actually that far it was just so hot), we arrived at the Economics building and took the elevator up tothe fourth floor, which had a great view of the RTI campus. Dr. Depro explained his career journey and his projects at RTI, which mainly focus on how environmental conditions affect the housing market and the specific groups of people affected by these changes. Dr. Depro was super nice and gave me extremely helpful advice that I will be sure to remember throughout college and my future career.
In the afternoon, I got to witness the SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope) in action with Kiera and Madisen. Two material scientists took us over to examine the samples of nanofibers they created. Because the samples were not metal, they were coated in gold to become electrically conductive (necessary for SEM to work since it uses electrons). The samples were then carefully placed in the SEM, and the researchers were able to scan through the images of the samples to find what they were looking for. Excited for tomorrow!
Day 3
Today, I visited the finance department of SAS. Throughout the day, I got to talk to many different people and got to see the different parts of finance. During one meetings with a global finance reporter, he talked about how they use programming to make it faster to categorize and clean up data within excel. He talked about how the process of doing their job has changed over the years as SAS continues to try and streamline all of the processes that occur within the company. This idea of making it easier and more efficient came up a lot throughout the time I have been at SAS, and it was interesting to see how many of the finance people knew how to use a simple programming tool called Visual Basics to make their jobs easier and more efficient. Today was also the first time where I got to sit down with the interns of a department and talk about how they got this internship as well as talk about college. There were 3 interns in the finance department. I thought that it was cool how we connected when talking about school and other stuff, although there was a significant gap between us both in years and perspectives. Even though the content that we learned today wasn’t as interesting as the previous days, I thought that we still learned a lot, especially receiving advice from the people there on how to seize opportunities and to always strive to find better ways of doing things.
