I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Kita Weitblick and will miss the kids and activities we did together! I’ll miss working with Markus, Ankha and Sarah as well and I thanked them for guiding me in this position and also with my language skills. Though of course the default is German, I was surprised at the widespread English language skills and references I encountered in this experience. Markus was proficient, and would translate for me if I did not understand instructions. Or, we would exchange terms, like telling each other what a type of bird was in our respective languages. The kids don’t speak much of either language being toddlers, yet some show up in little English/American T-Shirts or characters that say things like: “Let’s Get Going!”, “Snoopy Gang”, or “Harvard University.” When people hear I’m from the USA they assume I don’t speak German and switch to English until Kirstin corrects them and says I am learning. Nonetheless, I had a great time these past two weeks exploring Germany and work in the Kindergarten! Here is me and my buddy Marc:)
Tag: Last Day
The Final Model
I spent this morning adding a couple more sliders and switches to our model as extra features for the user to play around with. In the afternoon, Ethan and I met again to combine our code one last time for our final model. Seeing the final model was really cool as it really showed how much we’ve done these past two weeks. Here’s a before and after:
Before:
After:
Final Day Farewell
Similar to our meeting yesterday morning with Mr. French, this morning we had the pleasure of doing a Q&A session with the Senior Vice President of FWV, Ms. Barrie Hancock. We asked her about the biggest challenges that come with her job, as well as, what accomplishments she is most proud of. She relayed to us the difficulties that come from”client service” work as the job is never truly “done”: there are always new projects. Evidently, this is a gift and curse in the marketing agency world because it causes stress but also lots of versatility. She also expressed that her favorite aspect of her job is getting to watch younger employees flourish under her and her coworkers’ mentorship.
Day 8 at SAS
Today is the 8th and final day of my work experience at SAS. We started the day in building R to meet a employee that does the QUX or quality user experience of the product. She talked a lot about her job and gave us a very in depth tutorial on how to use the product she has been working on. She also showed us a broken product and how she is able to give critiques back to the UI developers to fix. After the meeting we jumped boat to meet another SAS employee named Dan. Dan does a lot of the UI aspect of the products, which meant how it looks on the screen to customers. I was really interested in how all the parts of the product is compiled together, so he drew a diagram that showed the progression from the client all the way down the main servers. He also talked a lot about his previous job at a very small start-up company. He described it to be much more fun and enjoyable because you are able to watch your company grow. But he has also enjoyed SAS since it is more flexible on due dates and it is much more stable because the reason he had to leave the start-up was because an investment fell through.
For the second half of the day, we all met up again in building A to present our final projects. Although we only had around two days to do it, I felt like we all made very solid videos. It has been an amazing two weeks at SAS. Everybody is really nice and the campus is also very pretty. I really felt immersed in SAS culture and will definitely not forget about the food.
Peace.
LAST DAY!!
For the past two days, the head of the Audience Development department has been gone for a surgery, so today we started the day off by making a podcast for her to update her on the week. In the podcast, we did a would you rather (live in below 0 temperature of 100 temperature always — sounded like a lose-lose to us)!
After we finished recording we saw the WRAL helicopter land on the nearby roof!
here’s a video of the landing: IMG_1406
Then, I met Jay, who is a part of the documentary team. I got to see the awesome documentary series that he’s working on – I can’t wait until it comes out! Then, we took a break for lunch and I met with Jaida again!
When I returned, I helped film some B-roll for an in-house video project. Finally, I sat down with Katie, who works for WRAL from a more advertising perspective. Overall, I really enjoyed my time at WRAL!
Day 3
Today, I had an exciting morning followed by a slower afternoon. I attended 1 committee meeting and a senate session. I had a good time and really was interested the committee meeting which discussed the farm bill of 2019.
The bill consisted of expanding the definition of agritourism to include hunting, fishing and shooting sports, and implementing a state hemp program. The committee meeting was like all the other committee meetings except there were the addition of 90 more farmers and concerned citizens. The amount of attendees at the meeting was so large that there had to be an overflow room for extra audience members. I found the meeting enjoyable because it was the first piece of legislature I felt was humanized.Ā
In the past few days, its been committee about documenting logistics, rewriting regulations and setting conditions, not about person stories and impacting legislature to the community. But, with this bill, there was an impassioned public forum of at least 30 speakers. All farmers from different parts of the state discussing how Hemp is a product that must be preserved and how the expansion of the definition of agritourism would extremely reduce the quality of life for wildlife and farm animals.
The speakers were great because all the rhetorical strategies and attention getting devices that I learned in English and in debate were used towards persuading representatives to change or validate their choice of passing or failing a bill. Overall, it was a refreshing and exciting experience. Iām glad that I got to end my time at the NC legislature on a extremely high note.
