Day4 – Page 3 – CA Work Experience Program

day four

The morning was spent doing a tedious yet mundane task of catalogingvarious pet store addresses around America. Our supervisor assured us that the information was crucial to their future plans albeit really time consuming to take down the details. Our day got much more interesting when we were invited to sit in on a few meetings. The first meeting was just two people, with one senior team member going over some of the elements of the Pendleton Whiskey client porfolio to someone who was about to join the team – basically just giving them some background information before the new person starts their tasks. Maggie, the senior team member, showed the us and the new person the programs FWV uses such as Slack and Basecamp to organize their workforce. Slack is a really great communication tool that I’ve used before, and it was super interesting to see it within a real business setting. Basecamp is such a powerful tool that I’ve never really heard of, but I guess that’s the point. It’s essentially the “behind the scenes” element of everything that FWV does for its clients. The second meeting we attended involved more of this ‘behind the scenes’ work, for FWV pitched a sponsorship idea to Redbull, which was a huge deal. On social media, we always see and interact with viral content, but we never really acknowledge the process by which it happens. Seeing how a PR firm pitches their sponsorship to a large, prominent company was a really exclusive peek into the business world and how it operates.

Day 4, IT, Jonathan Segal

Today was a bit of a whirlwind! The IT coordinator had me charging about the building to different people on fifteen minute blocks of time so that in the two hour period I was there I met eight different people and saw eight different jobs. My favorite part was talking to a person who managed chat services for SAS internal tech support. In addition to that job, he was running a program that dug through all of the files on one of SAS’s surveys, looking for files greater than a certain size. The program ran past his screen in a blur of black and white text, his eyes occasionally flicking over to see if it was still progressing. It was cool to see how that level of technology was integrated into every part of SAS. After lunch I talked to one of the IT managers. He showed me the various areas of the IT building he’s responsible for, largely under computer research and development. My favorite place was a room where they tested out all the new operating systems to ensure that they run correctly on all the computers SAS employees make use of. The picture I uploaded is only about 1/3 of the computers in the room; that must be a busy place when the updates come out!

Day 4

I spent my second day on the SAS campus touring the HR Department with Emma. We started off the day by meeting Bethany LeClair, who talked to us about her job promoting SAS to universities and trying to recruit new employees out of college. We also learned a lot about SAS’s programs to give back to the community, including a program called “SAS for Good”. After talking to her for about an hour, Emma and I shadowed a few other women that worked in the HR department. They showed us many of the things that they work on, including creating different webpages and websites for SAS employees. They talked about many of the departments within HR, and taught us about how they all work together in the end. We also learned about their previous jobs and how they ended up working in HR.

Day Four Galore

Day 4 + weekend was a blast! For my research project, I watched Girl, Interrupted and Shutter Island ( which was found on the Delta Studio in flight) during my trip to Atlanta. It was very upsetting because the flight to Atlanta is only 57 minutes, so during that time I only made it through about half of Shutter Island. When the screens turned off, I was right smack in the middle of an incredibly pivotal scene and had to look up the remaining plot on Wikipedia :(. It was a LOT less scary and moving reading a basic plot summary than watching in action, but it was still informative considering it is about a patient at a hospital for the criminally insane. The best part of Friday is that I got a call from Dr. McElreath telling me I was finally paired! I began work for the CCBI (City County Bureau of Investigators) this Monday.

Day 4: Am I touring or am I the tour itself?

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Today I helped one of the people I work with, Ryan, lead a tour with the visiting Cary Academy Art DT. It was very weird to help with the tour but also be apart of it myself since I haven’t had much gallery time. Brent Shelton was on this Art DT and took the video linked with this blog post of me handing out clipboards to do the interactive gallery activities on. The rest of the day was pretty boring so the highlight was the tour today. I really enjoyed seeing the tour from two different view points. The tour also made me appreciate Ryan a lot more.

DAY 4 – Too Much(Fun)gi!

Today was very chill and I had a lot of freedom to choose what I wanted to do. I followed one of Michelle’s coworkers and watched her conduct an experiment to create new bacteria cultures with a microbiologist. The apparatus was very complex (see pic below) and their goal was to use this machine to make “holes” (not sure if technical term or not) for bacteria cultures to grow. It took about an hour and a half for the experiment to run so I got to know Dr. Kim and Neylyn very well and had a lot of fun talking to them. After they were done, I returned with Dr. Kim to her lab for a tour, and she eagerly showed me all of her growing bacteria and fungi cultures. They smelled pretty bad but really cool nonetheless!!

Later in the day I met with an engineer/economist and had a really good chat with him. He is super smart and very very veryyy enthusiastic about his work. I mainly met with him because he works at the intersection of my interests (as of now), engineering/physical sciences and economics. He told me all about his job and the projects he does and how having knowledge in both fields has helped him with his career. He also gave me life advice for college and my career – including how important it is to make connections through these types of internships, and to know the job market even during freshman year. He was so incredibly passionate about his job that even I started to get excited about the projects he was working on – even though I literally did not know thermal engineering existed before meeting him!! I have learned so much through my first week at RTI and I cannot wait to continue working next week!

making the bacteria cultures (also could be featured in the RTI newsletter so stay tuned)

Mighty Awesome Day

Saturday Morning RPG, one of Mighty Rabbit’s most famous games

Today was such a fun day. We first got a tour of the Mighty Rabbit Studio, which as you can see below is a very fun and casual environment. We learned that they founded another company called “Limited Run Games”. It’s a really cool idea: they take games that were only available on digital or old classics and publish them to consoles like PS4 or PS Vita, but only for a “limited run”. (Once they sell out, they don’t buy more to sell – they keep the supply is limited). Right now they are preparing to release Broken Age to PS4 and PS Vita, so they have boxes all over the place ready to be filled with the games once they have to ship the games. Soon after, we got to meet with and talk to Ben Moore, a producer at Mighty Rabbit Studios, which gave us perspective in a lot of aspects of the business of game design. For example, as a small company, they have to make games for other companies to bring in the profits because taking 3 years off to make a game based on your own idea takes millions of dollars and time; something a small company doesn’t have access to. But, because they are an independent small company, we got to play Super Smash Bros and their new game Battlesloths at lunchtime. At the end of the day, we made a schedule for next week, and it looks awesome. Quite the collection

Day 4

Pictures are hard to come by considering their restrictions and Non Disclosure Agreement, but I will try to post at least one a day. This is their most famous title!

Upon arriving at Mighty Rabbit Studios today Shane and I were greeted by an empty conference room. At first we were very confused but very soon after the owner of Mighty Rabbit Studios entered the room and told us that Ben, the guy we would be working with, was running a bit late since he has been working so much overtime with a current project. Considering that the company has rights and licenses with outside companies I am not allowed to discuss what sort of software he was working on throughout the rest of this blog, but the project is soon to drop and everyone is working super hard to push for meeting the deadline.

One of the first things we found out upon arriving at Mighty Rabbit Studios is that, the company isn’t like many other companies in that it is also split with Limited Run games, and owned and worked by the same staff. At first this seems confusing and hard to keep up with. But in reality it is a technique that seems to work very well. Considering the company works out of the same building they dont have to pay two different rents. And one of the most important and helpful things that comes from the company being split is that when one side of the company isnt bringing in a good bit of revenue efforts can be focused in the other side, and the first side will just be put in sleep mode for a portion of time.

Limited Run games is cool because it takes hit games from last generation and revamps them to run on the new consoles and PC’s. In doing so they redo the graphics as well as redo how the game runs, but they keep the same story line and characters that everyone used to love. I think that it is a very cool idea because it brings back really fun games and reinterests the older generation into video games.