Project – CA Work Experience Program

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.

Day 5 at SAS

Today is the 5th day of the work experience at SAS. We started off the day by watching another good example of the project we have been working on. The GatherIQ team thought the instructions were a little loose and gave us a few changes to help us on our video. My group choose to challenge people to dance wherever they are if they don’t know any facts about the water crisis. It took us over 40 tries to perfect the introduction where we introduced some of the facts about the water crisis in Africa and what the challenge is. I really begun to appreciate professional actors’ abilities to have composure even after silly screw ups. After editing the video, we also put together a marketing power point to illustrate out how we are planning on making this video viral in order for it to make an impact. We will be presenting the video on Thursday.

SAS chocolate coins

Building C

Day 5: Grease and The Greenhouse

Today was the beginning of a new adventure, marking the start of my week at Louis Cherry Architecture in downtown Raleigh. I was so excited to get out into the community and immerse myself in the life of an architect! Louis Cherry Architecture is run by Louis Cherry, along with 5 other architects/designers. My two highlights from the day were visiting a site and shadowing a meeting with a mechanical engineer and drafting a greenhouse for one of LCA’s (Louis Cherry Architecture’s) current projects. At the meeting, I was able to check out the site of a future restaurant, where I also experienced the importance of problem solving. In this scenario, the restaurant to be was a very small space, and in order for it to pass certain regulations, there must be a ‘grease trap’ to prevent kitchen and food grease from getting into the sewage systems. The challenge with this is the grease trap is roughly 4x2x2 feet, so with such limited space (yep, the space in the pictures is all they have!), where would this grease trap go? A lot of times, what takes the most time in an architecture project is the problem solving to make it a reality; design is not the only thing required for a successful project. When I was researching greenhouse precedents, I was mostly looking for how to bring a modern aspect into the structure, as greenhouses often learn towards the traditional side. The project that this greenhouse corresponded with, “The Pool House”, is an ongoing residential project with a very modern and clean feel. For the second half of the day, I practiced using SketchUp and began to draft a model of the greenhouse I designed. Below are photographs of the restaurant site (located on Person St. next to Crawford and Sons), my workspace, and my work-in-progress a.k.a. the greenhouse.