Senior Projects

This week I’ve gotten a better grasp of what Robyn does and the types of cases she deals with. Last week one of the judges turned 70, and in Missouri any judge that turns 70 is forced to retire, so a new judge arrived. Because Robyn has more experience here, they reassigned her to protection services in court room 1 with the new judge because he’s never worked a Juvenile Court. Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays is when he has his review hearing dockets and he’ll also do detention hearings before the docket if he has any. This means that Robyn has about seven review hearings on each of those days along with potential adjudications and motion hearings. Yesterday and today we were in court from 9:00 AM to lunch time going through her docket. These cases are all very complicated and most very interesting but the review hearings are essentially just to get an update on how the child is doing, so they can be a little boring over time.

Tuesday, 4/30:

So, I am back at the History Museum for a full week, sort of. Since I worked World’s Fair opening weekend and have had plenty of weeks that are well over 30 hours, usually I work somewhere between 32-40 hours a week, I get tomorrow off. I am very excited to relax some and my mom and I have a fun day planned. We are gonna go thrifting, watch ”Challengers” at Wildwood B&B, and get lunch. I am excited to see ”Challengers” because personally, I don’t think Zendaya has that big of acting chops, but I have heard she is very good in the movie, so I will see for myself. Today has been pretty relaxed. I worked storytime, helped Julie, Andy, Emily, Maggie, and Elena prepare a craft for tomorrow. Then I attended a K-12 education department meeting. It was pretty short and then we just celebrated Don Davis’s (Julie’s dad’s) birthday. I am here until 4:00, but right now I have a break so I am just finishing up ”The Road”. I am bit tired because last night my dad and I went to get late night hamburgers (it was like 9:30, but for my dad it was late!), anyways I drank like a 30 oz Diet Coke so then I couldn’t fall asleep, so I used my time to watch the movie ”American Pie” instead of cleaning my room! I can not disclose the plot of ”American Pie” on this blog, so you will have to Google it yourself! I will say, I was pleasantly surprised given the plot and themes of the movie that it actually had a fair amount of depth. Most of the characters were pretty well written with good arcs, and even the female characters were not just one dimensional characters. I was impressed by this since many teen movies where the central characters are teen males often just write off the female characters as shallow or objects of desire.

These last couple of weeks just seem to fly by, knowing that we’re nearing the end of our Senior Project is surprising. It feels like my weeks seem to blur together, already forgetting my first couple weeks as a new face in the shop. I’ve found my place amongst all the artists- being here long enough to joke, tease and laugh with everyone like we’re close friends. There is still a level of professionalism in the building but nothing even close to how it is in any past jobs I’ve worked. No one seems to care here, it would be a stretch to say we’re ”like one big family” because it doesn’t feel forced, It’s like we’re all friends. I’ve gotten used to clocking in at 10:30am to clean, sweep, sanitize, and schedule any media posts for the first few hours only to leave the rest of my shift to whatever I desire. I draw for most of my time, interact with the guests and become a middle man of sorts (I’m who the artists go to when they need something in the shop that Chelsea needs to order or needs to be communicated with her.) The level at which they trust me is astounding- the owner included. In the second week Chelsea had given me a key to the shop, a shocking action because only a few artists in the shop have a key.

Monday – Shadowing Chris at LifeTime.

1. Nothing unusual happened. 10-12 normal towels folding.
2. 1-2 Chris meeting. I think I didn’t take any notes on this one.

Wednesday – Shadowing Chris at LifeTime.

1. I saw a guy holding a plates of samples of something and asked people to try. I passed him for like 2 times and he did not ask me. In fact I have no interest in trying or buying that anyways, but I do want to talk to him and ask him a few questions because I was bored.
2. Jamie told me that’s Mike, the cafeteria manager or something else, and he is usually pretty busy. I asked Chris if I can schedule a talk with Mike on next Monday and he said yes. So right now I’m writing down some questions for it.
3. I also asked Chris if I can volunteer at the cafeteria, but he said the only thing I can do is pretty much operational stuff. Even working at the cafeteria required a license or something. However, I certainly did try my best to find stuff to do and talk to people in order to figure out the business structure behind LifeTime WestCounty.
4. 1-2 Chris‘s meeting with one of his team member. They were just chatting. That guy’s a Christian and still think about LifeTime business after work. They even talked about George Washington for some reason.

Tuesday, Thursday, Friday: I was doing some stuff to apply Canada Visa, I drove into the city and I don’t like it there. Coursera went behind the schedule but it’s gonna be fine.

During these days I continued to work through angular. I was able to spend some time talking to another developer working on a team that does analysis in a way of maps for the government. The application they are working on is called QAC and goes through the maps written by the analysts using government data to figure out detailed information on structures. This application tells the analyst whether or not their information is correct or not. It goes through all the details and figures created and detects, for example, whether a building was reported in a lake. Obviously this isn’t a mistake that would be made but these little details that are errors this application will detect so they can fix it. This application requires going through a lot of data and information in the database to sort it out. They use a PostGres database like the one I was using for my project.

These days I spent working through Angular Javascript. Angular confused me and is still confusing me because the way they set things up in the code base uses multiple different files. A default angular website downloads code that has all the components and modules separated. This makes it so that you require a deeper understanding of the different types of languages required for these individual files. Angular uses typescript which is a language based off of Javascripts confusing language. This for me was actually harder to work with because I have to now learn typscript and how to convert my current javascript to typescript.

Saturday, 4/27:

I arrived at the museum at noon and worked until 5:00. My first job was to be a gallery attendant at Coloring STL, which entails greeting visitors, answering questions, and erasing any writing. There were three families who must have been all related who had like six kids a piece, these kids were going bananas. They were writing tons of stuff on the wall like ”skibidi toilet,” ”sus ohio,” and hate messages geared toward Taylor Swift, drawing dead stick figures, and two girls were taking out all the red and pink markers and leaving them on the floor! So, originally any time they went to another part of the gallery I would erase it, but then they just did it again. So, I channeled my inner tortiose, meaning ”slow and steady wins the race,” a.k.a. let them draw then leave and then finally erase everything. Then there was a teenage boy who reminded me exactly of Sam Leeker. DEAD RINGER. I think he had a crush on me and I just was not in the mood for a suitor, although he was quite funny. For the rest of my shift, I worked as a greeter downstairs, where it was pretty slow.

Sunday, 4/28:

My first job Sunday was to help out at the floral clock craft until noon. After that I will just be greeting people downstairs. I imagine it will be a slower day down here, so my goal is to finish reading ”The Road” and try to write some.

I am also feeling much better mentally than I was at the beginning of the week! I think I have realized that highschool will soon be over and that while it hurts and is frustrating I won’t be dealing with it much longer when I head off for Webster next year. I hope that the people I meet in college genuinely like me for being me and treat myself and others with dignity and compassion. I haven’t had much time to write, but I have been helping my mom prepare the senior picture frames for the sports banquet. I never realized how much work goes into them and she really puts a lot of thought into the gift!

Today Mrs. Kirk had a meeting with two witnesses to prepare them for trial on Monday/Tuesday of next week. I signed a non disclosure agreement simply so that their identities are kept confidential along with their personal information. This post will be a bit confusing and kind of long because I’m not allowed to disclose names, so I apologize if I make zero sense. The case includes a mother and father of 6 kids, 5/6 of the kids, and the grandmother on the fathers side. The case is complicated, but essentially the mother reported that the father had physically abused his mother (the grandmother). He ended up going to jail multiple times over the course of 2 years for breaking probation and continuing to beat his mother as well as the mother of his kids. After forensic interviews were held with the oldest kids at the time (6 and 4 years old), they found out the father also beat his kids (the youngest being twins that were one year old) and threatened to shoot them all on multiple occasions. After all of these things occurred, the children were taken out of their home and the father was in and out of prison while the mother still stayed with him and ended up getting pregnant with another child of his. Mrs. Kirk’s team has now been working a TPR (termination of parental rights) for both parents. However, last week the mother’s lawyer informed Mrs. Kirk that she was going to consent to the TPR. The father also stated that he was planning on consenting but that he couldn’t until the morning of the trial. If he does, the trial will be cancelled and there will be a hearing to determine what happens next.

Still working on taking apart that deck from way back at the beginning of my internship and it’s still super fun! I love getting to just put on some music or an audio book and taking something apart. More meetings but nothing new. I swear they get longer every time…

Today, I showed Mike Steinmann at HITS. HITS is a company that scans paper documents and makes them digital. With the paper that is left, they can do three things. The first is to shred the paper. The second is to send the papers back. The third is to keep the papers and a storage section at HITS. Most people do the first option, and most people don’t choose the third because it is so expensive. HITS mostly works with medical papers but is trying to expand to government papers.

Mike gave me a tour of the place, and then we had a meeting with another person at the company who showed us the new software that the company was going to use to keep track of all of the papers in the warehouse. We both talked for a little about owning your own business, and they told me that the most important thing is to surround yourself with people that you trust.

Mike had to leave early so I shadowed Jo, his number two at the company. She talked to me about different companies that she has owned in the past and a little about what she does from day to day.