Senior Projects

Today is my last day at ADB. It’s incredible how much I have learned here, not only about the “grown up” working world, specifically in relation to recruiting and construction, but also about people. I am just continually blown away by how wonderful everyone is here. You can tell it’s not perfect and people still have their disagreements, but they all care about their work and each other (and, amazingly, me, an intern for just two weeks). I hope I always remember this time here and take what I’ve learned into the rest of my senior project and my life.

This past week, I did another project for Kayla and then helped her out with a few smaller things. I finished up the research for Mr. Sharma and saw more of the recruiting-to-hired process, which I feel relatively comfortable with now, though I wouldn’t go so far as to put myself in charge of hiring someone. Day to day, Kayla’s schedule is basically the same and she goes over almost entirely the same tasks, with a few interruptions. I got to experience at least portion of what a day in the office is like, though I’m pretty sure I won’t easily find another place like this.

Today, I sat in on a checking-in meeting. We started off with an activity relating to the company values, which today involved Easter eggs. After that, everyone gave a summary of their past week and then what they needed to get done the next week. That went pretty quickly, and there were cookies too. They asked me how I had liked being here and then we took a picture all together with our Easter eggs.

All in all, I’m not excited to leave, but I am excited for the rest of my senior project and so glad that I spent time at ADB. I remember coming in the first day, I was so nervous, but it has turned out way better than I’d ever imagined and I have learned way more than I came in expecting to.

Although today is  Thursday, I will still call this my mid-week update simply because tomorrow is supposed to be really exciting and I will dedicate a single post to that day. This week overall has been as informative and exciting as the last. What has changed is my comfort here and my independence. I’m really glad that I elected to spend my entire project here because I feel I’m able to take on more fulfilling, long-term tasks all while becoming more familiar with the work of the partnership. At the moment it is clear that STLVW is a huge priority for the partnership and they want to make it the best it can be. In doing that, anchor tenants have become a big part of the conversation. Anchor tenants are often larger companies in the same industry as the smaller companies in the incubator, however, the STLVW incubators are not organized by industry, with the exception of Helix, which is bio/ag tech. Part of what I’ve been working on is categorizing all clients outside of Helix by industry. To be clear the goal at the moment is not re-locating them it’s just to see what the lay of the land is, someone freaked out about that the other day. What I’m finding is that outside of Ag/Biotech many of the small businesses are in business to business services such as, finance, accounting and legal services, advanced manufacturing and edTech. In an I&E meeting Tuesday the team pointed out that communication with the local chambers of commerce needs to be better and so I am making a spreadsheet of all of them. A chamber of commerce is an organization that protects the business interest, the benevolent ones at least,  of a certain community. There over 30 chambers of commerce in the St. Louis metropolitan area and the partnership hopes to work with many of them in the future. I’ve also been preparing the I&E team for upcoming global conferences on AgTech, EdTech, and FinTech.  My job first is to find the dates, prices and all the details. Then it gets really interesting. My next task was finding out what startups would be going and selecting the startups that the partnership would be most interested in working with based on industry, size, and location. Right now I’m doing this for TheNextWeb conference in Amsterdam and I have about 12 potential companies. One is like Duolingo, a fun language learning app, for science called Humbot(Download it its pretty cool).  I’ve really enjoyed my project so far. By the way one of the projects I completed has become kind of popular as it was much needed.

We went to the warehouse yesterday, those are the new cars we got. Our group are going to do the research of buying intention of different people now. Some of these mustangs are already ordered by customers. Today is really hot in Los Angeles. The second week goes really fast, I’m willing to improve myself through these days I spend in this company.

Today is the last day of work for this week. I only had three days of work this week actually. Monday I took my mom to the Newark airport for her flight back to China. She came with me because she was a little worried about me going to NYC all along. Anyway she stayed with me for 10 days. Friday is the good Friday, so everyone’s off work.

Everyday, I walk 4 minutes from my downtown apartment to Cortland/Fulton St station and take either 4/5 uptown to 42nd st & Lexington ave, or, the Grand Central Station to be more straightforward. At the beginning I usually got out from the nearest exit and then use google map to navigate the office. But after the first week, I discovered a secret exit(42 Street, Lexington Av, SW corner). It goes straight to the inside of the building I work in(Chanin). I literally don’t even have to step one step outside and be on the metro going home.

To Be Continued…

It is hard to come back working after a relax weekend. We had a meeting about market report for this season and I took notes about it. Also I made a excel table of the minutes of meeting today. I’m planning to visit our warehouse tomorrow. I’ll take some photo about it. This picture was taking by QiChuan when I’m making Excel table. He works here and he is from China.

I have continued watching Kayla go through applicants. The part that she does most often is review the resumes that come in, picking potential fits from those. All of the applications are beginning to look basically the same and I think I’m learning about what to put on and how to format a resume.

We also finished putting the Job Descriptions into the new format and then into the binders. I’m doing a little bit of research for Mr. Sharma about recruiting/HR software which is helping me understand more about that side of the recruiting world too. Through everything, I’m just witnessing and observing some of a small office’s politics and ADB’s particular culture.

Another thing that I’ve learned is just that sometimes you can have an entire day planned out with what you are going to do, but then something else comes up, and then another thing and another, and suddenly the day is over. Kayla explained that’s what “real life” is sometimes and you’ve just got to roll with it.

When I was writing that last post, I kept telling myself not to let it revert to a list format. But it just felt so unnatural, and I just have SO many things to say, so here’s a list of more things I’ve learned anyway:

1. Obviously, the state of the economy affects business. But to be able to predict where the economy is headed, Edward Jones tracks everything. They have an online, shared portal that is updated often. It tracks everything from the strength of the Russian ruble to Latino unemployment rates in California. This way they can predict the market with more accuracy.
2. They’re the only private financial services company in the country. This basically means that they do not have to release any information whatsoever about their profits, taxes, or growth. But all of their competitors do have to release those things, so they are in a really good position to understand the field.
3. Being a private firm rather than a public company also allows them to make longer term strategic decisions because they don’t have to make sure that their value increases each financial quarter when the reports are released. Since there are no shareholders to appease, they can truly make decisions based solely on what is best for the company in the next ten years.
4. I’ve decided that when I start interviewing for jobs I’d like to sample their cafeteria food. I’m sure nothing can top the food here.
5. A huge fundraising opportunity is days where charities sponsor people wearing jeans to work. The American Heart Association made 8,000 dollars off of EDJ last Thursday because you could pay $5 to wear jeans. How crazy is that?
6. If you’re in a left turn only lane, you don’t legally have to have your blinker on. (Sorry, that’s unrelated, but I just asked a policeman that yesterday because I’ve been wondering for a while. And I think that’s an important fact to be aware of.)
7. The Canadian dollar is a remarkably stable currency.
8. A common misconception is that the further below a 1:1 ratio with the USD a currency is, the poorer their economy is faring. But you have to look at the fluctuation of the currency over time to estimate the state of their economy, not just how it converts to the dollar. So, for example, the fact that you need 18 Mexican pesos to equal one USD does not mean that the Mexican peso is weak. What makes the Mexican peso weak is that in 2014, it was only 13 pesos to 1 dollar.

Over the first week and a half of working out here at the DBOC, I have made what I believe to be a very important piece of information. The schools that come out to SNR have a very different idea about how to learn about outdoor education. Only one of the schools seemed to have any idea of what was going on around the area. Funnily enough, it was the second graders. The 5th and 8th graders couldn’t care less about what was happening here. their interest was finally peaked when we actually took part in the classes. I helped teach pond to both the second graders, and as far as I could tell, the 2nd graders knew more than the 8th graders did! I found this interesting as I noted that the 2nd graders came from a school that seemed to be similar to TFS in the younger grades. It was not however a Montessori school.

After the two pond classes I have helped with, I do believe that I would be able to co-teach one of these classes.

As a side note, I have also been researching information for an pair of interpretive trails that will be built around the area. One will pass near a small pond that only shows up when we have had intense rain (like in the past week), and the other will go through the wooded area behind the cabins.

The trail by the pond will be an animal focused trail, with information about beavers, woodpeckers, deer, frogs and other local animals. The other trail will be plant based with information relating to native trees and medicinal plants in the area that we will try to locate. Due to the interests of my supervisor, It will also have an area that is devoted to mushrooms. Mainly morels during the spring and other more common fungi during the summer and fall.

My afternoon of yesterday consisted of me doing an activity which I normally going out of my way to avoid. Gardening. I helped transplant some plants from areas where they were doing maintenance on the trails, and the most interesting plants were probably the may-apples, which are very interesting, umbrella like plants.

I can say with great confidence that I greatly enjoy what I am doing out here.

I spent last week working with the Firm Analytics and Competitive Insights teams downstairs. Now I’ve moved up to the ninth floor, and this week will be spent with Mr. Rawlins and his team in Treasury.

Yesterday, a guy named Tyler emailed me access to all of their data that keeps track of their business done in Canadian Dollars (CAD). He asked me to make a spreadsheet that would sort all the data into the different of accounts that they’re held in. There are two different types of accounts–Timed Deposit and Repos, that are held in the Bank of Montreal and Royal Canada Bank. So it’s essentially tracking how much money each of those four accounts had in them, each day, for the last year and a half. So far, the spreadsheet has over 1600 rows of data.

When they assigned that to me, I informed them that I’d used Excel approximately four times ever, in my entire life, and I wasn’t sure they should be entrusting me with the organization of billions of dollars. They just kind of laughed at me and I had to figure it out. But most of it is copying and pasting, just a time-consuming task that no one had gotten around to yet.

Today, they showed me how they manage all the Canadian money in the twelve(ish) different accounts there. The woman who manages it, Susan, has to go into their online treasury portal and make sure that each account has enough money in it for all the estimated withdrawals of the day, so that they aren’t charged for overdraft.

Something that I’ve found really interesting is the relationship Edward Jones has with the banks. I thought of EDJ as the customer and the bank as the service provider–naturally making the bank do as much as they can to provide EDJ with the best service so that they don’t move to another one. But what seems to actually be the case is that everything EDJ does kind of annoys the banks, and they have to try really hard to be low-maintenance so that the bank doesn’t close the account.

For Wednesday and Friday. I’ll keep working on this spreadsheet and hang out in treasury, and sit in on a couple more meetings. On Thursday I’ll go to the North campus in Maryland Heights to shadow Steve Ford in sourcing. I’m not super sure what exactly that is, but I’m sure I’ll find out!

And one last thing–I see a lot of articles about how bachelor’s degrees are useless and the only reason to get one is because it’s a prerequisite for lots of jobs. But you definitely need one degree, and maybe two to be able to work here. Otherwise, I think it would be very hard to figure out what’s going on (at least that’s my experience so far). The rhetoric is extremely high-level, and there are lots of business and economic theories put into practice. You really do need to know about all of it and be fluent in the language.

(One last thing part 2: I haven’t been attaching pictures because I can’t take them of anything really, because it’s all very confidential financial information. I’ll try to take a picture of my lunch of something.)

I’ll do another post on Friday when I figure out what the Sourcing department does!

Working with really new thing is always fun and hard. For the wools frog, it is like that. At least I made them out, except it didn’t look like the picture they have on the cover.

 this picture is mine.

This is the felting needle, I have to run through Michaels and Hobby Lobby to try to find it. It is really easy to break. I use this to poke the wools to the shape I want it to be.

Summary: Good to try but no more wools!!!