Senior Projects

This week, I continued to work with my uncle. As I mentioned earlier, some franchises are suing corporations for charging them too much for marketing. So, for some of my time, I had a list of people who saw TCA for a digital ad, and I needed to write down if they hired The Cleaning Authority. The other time this week, I was sitting in Zoom meetings. Most of them were to make sure that the company was still running smoothly. One of the days, I went to two of the three franchises that he owns. I went to the one in St. Charles and Fairview Heights. In the morning at the St. Charles office, he made a speech to the cleaners, telling them how good they were doing. It’s also to show that he cares and knows about his employees. That day, he also showed me the fun side of being self-employed, and we watched horse racing.

Fairview Heights office:

Horse track:

This week was my first week with Robyn Kirk, an attorney at the Juvenile Courthouse Downtown. The attorneys there work on two sides of juvenile care: Child Protection Services and Juvenile Delinquency. Mrs. Kirk works with both sides, as well as cross-over cases, but focuses mostly on CPS. I had about 2 hours there on Monday before I felt like I was coming down with something, which unfortunately led to missing most of the week.

Thursday, 4/25:

On Thursday, I helped with the Covenant Christian School’s production of ”MacBeth.” They are all 4th / 5th graders, so it was interesting to see their and Hannah’s approach to a very dark play, that quite frankly, even disturbs an adult cast. To do this project, Hannah’s big focus was less on the violence and more on the idea that you are faced with countless choices in your life and sometimes we choose the wrong things for the wrong reasons, i.e. Macbeth choosing to murder the king for his own benefit and to satisfy his own and his wife’s hunger for power. The space we were in was much smaller and there was no stage, on top of that there was a pole in the middle of the floor that went to the ceiling, so it was a difficult area to work within. The kids had three performances today, one in the morning, and then two back to back in the evening. They did a really great job of working within the space and bringing their characters to life. I helped with the evening shows. After hanging up props, sweeping and mopping, and setting up chairs, I then handed out programs to guests.

Friday, 4/26:

Tomorrow, I will be coming back to Covenant Christian in the morning, however, there is no performance, I was just helping Hannah clean up the space and pack up the set. There likely won’t be a whole lot to say, so I am just posting tonight. I will help Hannah for about 3-4 hours, then I will have the rest of the afternoon to re-coop, before working opening weekend of World’s Fair. I have heard that this week was quite hectic at the museum. There was also a visit from a celebrity to check out the World’s Fair exhibit this week— John Goodman! I was sad that I missed this celebrity encounter because my dad loves him, but I loved helping Hannah and you can’t win ’em all!

Where do I start? Well, time is flying by fast with my time at Crisis Nursery. Here is my experience Monday through Wednesday. On Monday Morning, I got to the nursery around 9 am; the kids had already had breakfast served by the staff. What’s neat is every week, there comes a new set of kids; most kids only stay three to four days, and the most extended kids stay in a week. So, there was speculation that we would have twin newborns on Monday, which was true. I got there, and there were twins two months old, and then they had an older sibling, so there were three kids there, and then there were three other siblings of kids and then three more siblings. So, a total of eight kids is the most this specific nursery can have. The babies were so cute, but it also shocked me to realize how little they were and that their parents couldn’t take care of them then. The day was the same routine as every day. I was excited to hold newborns and play with new kids, too. I learned a little about what the kids are allowed to play with; for example, they can only watch certain movies that are not inappropriate. Because of bacteria and safety issues, they can’t play in the sprinklers or have a pool. Only the staff is allowed to change them. Come back for part two to hear about the rest of my experience at Crisis Nursery Next week!

Where do I start? Well, time is flying by fast with my time at Crisis Nursery. Here is my experience Monday through Wednesday. On Monday Morning, I got to the nursery around 9 am; the kids had already had breakfast served by the staff. What’s neat is every week, there comes a new set of kids; most kids only stay three to four days, and the most extended kids have stayed in a week. So, there was speculation that we would have twin newborns on Monday, which was true. I got there, and there were twin two months old, and then they had an older sibling, so there were three kids there, and then there were three other siblings of kids and then three more siblings. So, a total of eight kids is the most this specific nursery can have. The babies were so cute, but also it shocked me to realize how little they were and that their parents couldn’t take care of them then. The day was the same routine as every day. I was so excited to hold newborns and play with new kids, too. I got to learn a little about what the kids are allowed to play with. For example, they can only watch certain movies that are not inappropriate. They can’t play in the sprinklers or have a pool because of bacteria issues and safety issues. Only the staff is allowed to change them. Come back for part two to hear about the rest of the week.

My first two weeks of the senior project have been slow. I have been helping the general manager in the immigrant center with Excel sheets. My main job every day was to put attendants on the computer. Five different ethnicities come for different activities, food, and language lessons. Some of them need a ride to the center and back, so my job is to put all the people who attended the classes and who needed a ride onto the spreadsheet. Some of the time I was helping to serve food and prepared cutlery for the next day and clean afterwards.
There are not many things that I have learned :/ but still, I have learned somethings. First, if my future “serious” job would consist mostly of spreadsheets – I would hate that job. Another thing that I learned is some knowledge of how electronics work a three-hour job can take only 30 min!!!
I think that would be a great place to volunteer! Because in the places where our school is volunteering, most of the people get a salary for the same work that we are helping with – so they have people to do it! At the immigration center, they are lacking people to work. Even though they have some staff, in my opinion, it would be more impactful and useful to volunteer at such a place instead of a park or something similar to it!

It feels like Thursday for me right now… I had to be at one of the properties over the weekend to host an open house. Since then I’ve done some more work fixing up the properties, working on newsletters, attending too many meetings, and scanning more documents. I swear this will all be more interesting in the presentation when I can show the pictures. (or at least the parts where I’m actually out working will be)

So, this week I am not at the History Museum, but I will be back there Saturday and Sunday for the opening weekend of the 1904 World’s Fair exhibit. Since there will probably be a lot of stuff, I will do three posts this week: part 1 of Shakespeare, part 2 of Shakespeare, and then the World’s Fair weekend.

Tuesday, 4/23:

Today is my first day with Hannah Geisz. She works with school groups to help them with their own Shakespeare productions. Today and tomorrow I will be at the South City Community School in Tower Grove. The school is preschool-8th grade, private, and pretty similar to TFS. One thing that is different is that the school building is really old, I don’t know how old, but I would bet it may be pre-1960’s which is when CDS now TFS was established. This week is their show week, so it was pretty hectic because they also had a few kids go home early because they were sick, a teacher out sick, and a field trip to the Butterfly House. I originally thought I would be with Hannah in the morning and afternoon, but we had a miscommunication so I was just there in the afternoon and evening. They performed ”A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and it was really great! My main job was to put up posters and hand out tickets. I had a lot of fun!

Wednesday, 4/24:

I will be back at SCCS again today and I imagine it will probably be similar to yesterday with the addition of clean up. Thursday and Friday I will be helping out at Covenant Christian School for their production by fourth and fifth graders of ”MacBeth”.

On a personal note, I am not feeling too good this week, mentally speaking, but I am not the kind of person to let things get me down, so I am doing my best to move on and just have fun this week. I am not gonna get into the issues, but I am feeling a little hurt and insecure currently. But to make me feel better I am gonna make myself a good breakfast, dance and lift weights, watch this YouTuber’s coachella vlog, and then head out for Shakespeare with Hannah, and I am going to have fun while doing it!

A lot of issues happened with posting this, I had to take this post down last week, because I realized messed it up so yea. Anyways my experience Monday through Wednesday. I Got to the nursery that morning and it was a whole new group of kids, Basically everyday is the same schedule, wake up have breakfast, play until 10am have a snack if wanted, than play till 12 have lunch then rest and have movie time until 3pm and than the next shift of staff comes in. I have learned a lot of far about how the schedules for the staff. How they take in kids and the paperwork that comes with that. Im not sure if I mentioned one of the kids we think has non verbal Autism who is five years old. Anytime he can’t do something he throws himself on the floor and screams, Allie our occupational therapist seemed to calm the child, it was calming for said child. That was pretty much the week for week one. There will be new kids in week two. I will be including photos but for the safety of the children and their well being I will be not showing their faces or sharing who they are.

Monday – Shadowing Chris at LifeTime

1. (10-12am) Operational work (Folding, transferring, loading towels)
2. Because Chris is at the top of the pyramid, I also want to try to be an operational staff which is at the bottom of the pyramid.
3. I met a diverse type of people there. Some of them showed up to work late, some of them connect their phone to bluetooth and listened to music that has a lot of swearing. The volume was quite loud that I suspect people can hear it while working out.
4. (1-2pm) I went back to Chris and observe his meeting. I learned some new stuff about LifeTime but feel lazy to share them.

Wednesday – Shadowing Chris at LifeTime

1. (10-12am) Operational work
2. There were like 27 operational staff in total with about 4 to 5 of them show up in a day.
3. After loading towels to the male changing room, I felt bored because there’s nothing else I can do to help. So I went to find Jamie, the operational manager, and started a conversation with him.
4. Most of those 27 staffs were paid hourly, only like 5 of them is the Lifetime permanent staff.
5. I asked about the hardest part of his job, and he said is the deployment of the schedule. He mentioned that a lot of staffs just don’t show up on time, or they just request absence without giving a reason. When they don’t show up, Jamie has to take care their work while still doing his own stuff like budgeting management.
6. Then he talked about his job and LifeTime West County before he became the operational manager.
7. He said he was once a salesperson when LifeTime West County still have selling groups for individuals. Then he was brushed off by new applicants because the amount of them was just huge.
8. Another reason was that a large amounts of LifeTime were built in rural areas rather than in big cities. And it indicates that new customers won’t keep growing forever in some rural areas. For old clubs like WestCounty, it is more important to keep old employees than recruiting new ones.
9. This trend has led to the disappearance of the sales positions toward individuals, and also reflects the importance of operational work. Because giving customers a good experience is the essence of retaining customers.
10. Then We talked about some college stuff and he shared some of his personal family stuff with me.

Tuesday, Thursday, Friday – Coursera Programming.

1. It went alright.