Day5 – Page 3 – CA Work Experience Program

Walk West: Day 5

This morning kicked off at around 8:30 AM. Instead of coming in at 10, I came early to attend the 9 AM Monday morning stand-up meeting. Today’s meeting was rather short, due to a fairly busy week for the rest of the office. Important items from last week were brought up and then the floor was open to everyone. Following this, I sat in on two other meetings. These were also team meetings, but broken up into small groups based on a certain area or project. Each person went around and discussed what they would be working on for the week to come. After both of these meetings, I started back up with some more research. Backlinks to a site are when another website (that is not the Walk West) links to the actual Walk West page. Having more backlinks to your website is definitely a positive and can give your company more credit. However, some websites will mention your company, but not include a link to your website. I was assigned the task of googling different terms where Walk West may be mentioned and checking if they linked to the Walk West page. Some of them did not and when this was the case, I contacted either whoever wrote the article or just the website in general. I asked them to include a link to the Walk West website. After a lunch break, I started on a task to prepare for an event launch for a client on Wednesday. I went through a list of people attending and tried to find their twitter handles — personal or for their organization. Later on in the day, I actually received an email back from one of the companies I had reached out to about links. They fixed the link and wanted to write an article about Walk West. I found it super exciting that if I had not been doing that research, they may not have reached out to write an article! I’d say it was a pretty successful day.

DAY 5

Our supervisor asked me to come in an hour earlier than usual so I could sit in on their monthly meeting. This meeting was one of the coolest things of our whole experience – there were 2 phones from LA and NYC and everyone in the raleigh FWV office in one room for a conference call. Within the span of an hour, each branch had presented their major accomplishments of the month, which was surprisingly numerous considering how exclusive the firm is. One of my favorite things I heard was how the Raleigh office had had an idea for a campaign for Rider’s by Lee clothing involving filming in LA. Both firms talked out the plan during the meeting, and flights for the ‘actors’ and the set were booked within 10 minutes. It’s crazy to think how fast these big ideas can happen with a little hard work. The rest of the day consisted of me continuing to catalog pet store addresses which wasn’t necessarily fun, but I’d had my fair share of excitement in the morning.

Day 5: Busy and Boring

Since the museum is closed on Monday I didn’t get to go into work. That just meant that today was 2 times the amount of normal cutting. For the Symposium that the Nasher is hosting we decided to get creative with our folders and used cereal boxes as the covers. This meant we had to cut up 100’s of cereal boxes. The perk was getting to eat the cereal. Here is the final product. We also arranged all the name tags alphabetically which is harder than it sounds. Singing your ABC’s over and over again is annoying.

Day5, Web Development, Jonathan Segal

Today was spent with SAS’s Adobe Experience Manager expert. AEM allows companies to build websites without a lot of technical experience, and a lot of people at SAS take advantage of it, building websites for their departments and divisions without taking a close look at the SAS requirements for a website’s aesthetic. The job of the person I was with is to look at the websites, fix any issues users may have with AEM, and ensure that users are falling within standard specifications. He went through how he and his co-workers manage their projects via a system called Agile. Agile allows workers to dynamically manage tasks for specific projects, working on tasks in an un-rigid order if it’s necessary. His job also involves a lot of math for his analysis of website use and design; funnily enough, he uses an old calculator for that math (featured below). Kind of makes me wonder if all our fancy graphing calculators are really needed?

Day 5

I spent my 3rd day at SAS with “Corporate Creative,” an in-house firm that works with marketing to create ads and run social media for SAS. Emma and I spent most of the morning with Evan, a copy writer, and he showed us what is was like creating different advertisements for social media. He talked a lot about the importance of a strong title or slogan to draw in potential customers. He also talked a lot about his background in sport journalism and how it helped him get into marketing.

After eating lunch in the C building, we spent the afternoon with Sean. While Evan worked with text-based ads, Sean worked in the video department. He showed us a lot of the behind-the-scenes that goes into creating SAS commercials and hosting events, and we even got to watch them create a video advertisement! While I’m not sure if I would want to pursue a career in corporate creative, it was definitely interesting to see a lot of the behind-the-scenes.

Day 5

Today was a pretty relaxed day, after arriving at Mighty Rabbit, Shane and I were told to shadow a guy named Kurt who is focused on the console development of a game that is yet to be released. He was fail testing a few previous builds of the game in attempt to locate the source of an error in the code. It was really interesting to see how even the professionals make the simple mistakes and those simple mistakes can go a long way to screwing up the game entirely from the most simple roots.

After lunch we met back up with Ben and he talked us through the shipping and processing of the game to give us more of a look into what he focuses on in the company, and then he set us on a task to work on our own projects of code.

Day 5 at Osceola Studios

Today I learned about pitch correction.

I was intimidated when Mr. Hodgin told me that he uses $5000 dollar microphones with a $400 dollar plugin in a $1000 dollar software, but the theory applies to all levels of music production.

When an artist records vocals or harmony vocals, no matter their skill level (yes, even Beyonce…) they always have some level of variation off of the perfect pitch. When there are five harmonies behind a main vocal, even the slightest missed notes can mess up the sound. So, engineers use a program called Melodyne to correct the pitches. This software writes out the notes that are being sung on a keyboard screen and has a line that follows the exact path of the singer’s voice. Mr. Hodgin can then pull the variation closer to the correct note, or even move the note to another note on the scale if he wants. After he does this process carefully to all of the harmonies, the result is a sweet, soft, and perfect-but-not-robotic sound.

Day 5

On our first Monday in the office, we were lucky enough to attend a presentation given by Professor Nimmi Ramaujam from Duke to discuss the pocket colposcope she has developed. Though some of the science went over my head at times, I was fascinated by how her team’s human-centered design process resulted in a prototype that not only decreased the price of a colposcope from tens of thousands of dollars to just a few hundred, but also simplified the process of screening for cervical cancer. With clever engineering, her team was able to create a colposcope that produces the same quality of images but at a much lower price and size. A colposcope is essentially a high-powered camera to examine the cervix for abnormal growth, and many clinics in developing parts of the world use only cameras to conduct colposcopies. But with Prof. Ramaujam’s colposcope, clinics can easily and cheaply perform the screening procedure by plugging the USB end of the device into a smartphone to view images in real time, instead of sending women to more advanced clinics because the less advanced technology was inconclusive. It was neat for me to hear about the design process that went into creating the colposcope and how it took a team of not just scientists, but also engineers and women to provide the necessary feedback.

– Hope

Monday, June 5th – It’s Video Shoot Day

Today, I got to experience the action. We followed a women that works around the triangle to teach excercise classes to senior citizens. The camera crew focused on getting good shots of Mrs. Linda while she was teaching and interacting with her students before and after class. There was also some moments when Mrs. Linda was interviewed herself. This story was awesome to follow, and it was unique to see the behind the scens work for a production. There was a great mixture of impromptu and planned moments. We followed Mrs. Linda to three different classes, and to pick up her grandkids. This segment will be apart of a series and air on North Carolina NOW.

-Kennedy Byrd

Day Five Jive

Today I spent the day in jail. I never thought I would saying that, but it’s true. I met my supervisor at CCBI in the morning and luckily they were starting interns today, so I got the introductory tour as well as the history of CCBI. At noon, he dropped me off downstairs with the members of Squad C on the Criminal Identification Unit. I spent four hours watching them process and fingerprint/photo criminals, standing about two feet away from the criminals (with no handcuffs on) every time. In the off time, I heard plenty of fascinating “war” stories as my supervisor liked the call them from his time at the agency. He told of one time when he had asked an intern to help roll over a very bloated dead body to get a look at his front. After they had rolled him over, the dead body has expelled this excess gas which sounded a lot like it was taking a breath. The intern jumped up and screamed “OH HELL NO” and proceeded to sprint outside. My supervisor said that it took him five minutes to recover from laughing after that spectacle and eventually he let the intern wait in the car.

The first picture is me alongside the four interns who were beginning their journey at CCBI. We all had to try on bulletproof vests because we are required to wear them for the ride-alongs with the Investigative Unit who report to crime scenes across the county. I will get to do this on Wednesday :)))))))))

The last picture is from the evidence room where they collect confiscated drugs and they had GIANT bags of marijuana in their room. There was so much that the smell was overpowering and our supervisor said that “Wednesday is weed day.” I laughed at this, but he explained that is when the various precincts turn in their collected weed and on Wednesdays, it can be smelled all over the building.

I can’t wait to see what tomorrow has in store!