Month: May 2017

So the first three and a half weeks went by slow for me. but the next three and a half weeks is going to be slower. For the first half of the project i worked out in Innsbrook, remodeling a cabin. now i am working with a pool company called, “Jerry the barefoot pool guy”. I know it sounds funny but its true. Plus the only people who run the company are Jerry and his son Casey. Since there was massive storms, my work has been limited. Most of it was just draining pools.
I am sorry for not posting in a while. My parents decided that we are putting my house up for sale so lots of time has been focused on packing and making the house look pretty for the insurance company. Lots of your guy’s posts are very intriguing. Hope to hear more from you all!
Manning
p.s. I will post pictures after this post.

This week I haven’t really worked much on the projects I’ve mentioned in other posts. I started my week as I mentioned at Arch Grants which is more of a startup atmosphere whereas the partnership is more corporate maybe even political environment. After returning to the partnership for the end of the week I’ve been out of the office for most of the day. On Wednesday Ginger and I went to the Gateway to Innovation Symposium at the convention center. Being there with Ginger made the experience really worth while because she’s probably one of the more popular people there and so I was introduced to a lot of cool people doing cool things, people who I wouldn’t get to meet otherwise. After G2I we went to a Brazen event at the Science Center. Brazen is a business development group dedicated to helping women entrepreneurs. I counted and I was 1 of 5 men in the room in a room of 200 but, the numbers are the other way around in the real world. Women are far less likely to get a loan from a bank and even less likely to receive venture funding at the same stages of growth as their male counterparts. Thursday I went to one of the STLVW incubators, Helix Center, to help with a tour for a group of volunteers. This week has kind of exposed me to what it’s like to be like super duper busy. 

Yesterday I went to the Monsanto at Creve Coeur. That is where their regulatory division is centered and I ended up spending most of the day with Anirudh. He is in charge of making sure that their corn meets all of the regulations for the different countries that they have customers in.

He showed me a lot of how their company is structured and the “pipeline” that their products have to go through. They end up spending millions of dollars on products that end up failing at some point of the process, or get weeded out. There’s an incredible amount of work that goes into each one and around 1% of the products that they start off with make it to the market. He also showed me the countries where they grow and then countries that are their buyers, either of GMOs or breeding plant.

We also talked about my future, college and beyond, a fair amount. Anirudh was a college professor for a while when he was younger and he gave me some advice about interacting with professors, and keeping in mind what I might want to do as a profession while I was pursuing my degree in college.

Then at lunch, people were pretty nice and teased with me some. It was cool though because I had a question about what I was supposed to do and they helped me out, while having a little bit of fun too.

This morning, I took the AP History test and that was fun. I didn’t drink enough coffee in the morning ’cause I was rushed, but I think it was okay. I actually really enjoyed responding to the short answer questions, which I normally don’t like as much as the essay questions.

Next week, I’m moving onto working with Coach Frye’s company. I’m excited! This week was fun, though it was crazy to go to a different place every day, pretty much. There was a lot of trying to find where I was allowed to park, but that only really happened with Monsanto. Anyways, I learned a LOT about lab science and other fields that you can go into with a science degree, as well as getting to work with kids and clean closets. It was a full and diverse week.

Today was pretty much the same as yesterday and we finished setting up the store for the pop up tomorrow. I’m excited to see which designers sell and which don’t. I know which ones I would buy, but I feel like I definitely have different taste/values than the crowd in trendy, hippie, sometimes impractical Brooklyn.

On a mostly unrelated note (but is anything truly unrelated? A thought for your Thursday), I’ve kind of put my finger on why I love cities like New York and Bangkok and London so much.

I tried to go to sleep fifteen minutes ago and I had to close my shades. It was physically too bright for me to go to sleep–the light radiated through my eyelids. Everything is so lovely and electrifying that it actually keeps me from doing something boring like sleeping.

But mostly, it’s cities like this that remind me of why I’m so excited to be alive and have so much future ahead of me. The incessant bustle is a 24 hour reminder to me to go the extra mile, to do exciting things even if I’m tired, to be motivated and ambitious and hungry. It reminds me to keep outrunning my biggest fear: becoming suffocated, jaded, pessimistic and empty.

I can’t help but think that light is the most perfect metaphor in a world of imperfect metaphors. The opposite is darkness and death and oblivion–and two of the most feared things are darkness and death. And if people ever thought about it, I’m firmly convinced that oblivion would be too.

Anyway, I’m not really sure where I’m going with this but it’s an interesting thought train that I’m planning on pursuing further in the morning.

But to put it simply: I feel motivated like I haven’t been in years. I’m ambitious and hungry. I’m back to reading and writing and thinking about all sorts of tricky things. The credit is rather split up–a combination of some fortunate events, I suppose. New York. Independence at last. No burden on my shoulders. Some certainty about my next four years. And mostly this project, probably. And maybe the fact that I’m living on a steady diet of challa and brie (which I didn’t even realize was my dream in life until I discovered the combination on Monday).

Anyway pt. 2: that’s seriously not relevant but my day wasn’t very interesting so I thought I’d share with you the fact that I seem to be having the opposite of an existential crisis (not sure what that would be called) for once, in my dramatic, mystery-plagued adolescence.

Anyway pt. 3 (sorry I swear this is the last one!!): since I’m on a roll here I wanted to share another couple of thoughts–I think lots of young people seem reckless because at this age, death is often too abstract a concept to be feared. Also grammar was totally made up by humans and so were the shape of these letters but somehow as I type these in New York you’ll read them in your head hundreds of miles away exactly as I intended and that just absolutely amazes me and I really need to go to sleep now so I am seriously ending this post right now. Thanks for listening to my rambling and you should seriously be thankful that you’re not with me in person right now because I’m sure it’s at least twelve times more obnoxious.

Today is Thursday with really nice weather here. And it is almost the end of this week. I keep did some translate works from the left by yesterday. I didn’t finish all of them yesterday. Also I helped did some calculations of incomes and costs. The guy I’m working with named Billy and he is almost 40 years old. I learned a lot from him for example the way to talk and communication skills. If you want get something form a person you need to talk to him. The way you talk to him and the words you speak will decide whether you can achieve your goal or not. Sometimes your words need to be gentle and someone need to be strong. Also he told me that I should tell jokes on the proper way in a appropriate time. Some place is not for joking and I need to be serious at that specific time.

This week is probably my craziest week. Monday and Wednesday, I was working at my church’s Preschool in the mornings and then on Tuesday I went to Monsanto’s Chesterfield site. Tomorrow I will go to the Monsanto in Creve Coeur, which is where most of their regulatory teams are located now, but that is in the process of being changed since they want everything to be more centralized at the Chesterfield location. On Friday, I will take the US History AP in the morning and since I would have gone to the preschool that day before I decided to take the test, I will have the rest of my day “free,” but I expect that I’ll find something to fill my time with.
My time at the Preschool has been nice. I’ve helped out there before so it was kind of nice to do a more familiar thing. On Monday, I organized part of their massive closet and I think I made it better. Today, I helped out my mom. The two other teachers that work with her on Wednesday were trapped because of the flood, so I and another substitute were with my mom to take care of all those kids. That was pretty fun, but I got tired, especially during our indoor recess time.

At Monsanto, I shadowed people. I mostly talked to lab scientists, all of whom were very interesting and fun. Two of them were especially fun and we got coffee and relaxed in their office, talking about the science behind the different steps in the overarching process that Monsanto goes through to get their products. They both have kids a little younger than me and so they could explain what they were doing in ways that were much easier for me to understand; the other scientists explained their work well, I just had to think harder and longer to comprehend what they were saying.

My dad had also just started working at Monsanto so he met up with Mr. Duff and me for lunch in the café (where the guy who served me was super nice by the way, guessing that it was my “first day”). That was neat and a nice, comfortable break for me in my day stuffed with one shadowing after another. The whole day was incredible, though somewhat exhausting, and I definitely learned a lot.

Tomorrow, I will have the day at Creve Coeur and I’m excited. I’m guessing that it’ll be relatively different from my day at Chesterfield, just since I’m pretty sure that I’ll be shadowing fewer lab scientists.

Today we worked at the Brooklyn Expo Center (which is awesome because it’s half a block from where I’m staying and the office is in Williamsburg, a 20 minute bike ride from me). It took ages to set up and we still aren’t done, but we have another day until the show on Friday.

I thought I’d compile a list of a few things I’ve had to become adept at/some general tidbits:

1. Explaining why I’m not in school (“My school basically doesn’t make us take classes for the fourth quarter of our senior year if we do internships or otherwise justify how we’re using that time”). Everyone says they wish they had it. I wish everyone got to have it too.

2. Remembering to check in for my Southwest flight exactly 24 hours ahead. (Just kidding because I’m actually 0/3 on this one but I’m really hoping I remember this time)

3. Generally figuring out how to get places and budgeting time. I give myself an extra twenty minutes if I need to be someplace on time and I just grab a coffee if I’m early. I’ve almost been late a few times, so I can’t imagine what would’ve happened had I not left twenty minutes early.

4. Surreptitiously checking Apple Maps so that the other people on the bus don’t know that I’m not from New York or Washington.

5. I’ve become quite good at consolidating the 18,000 reasons why I’m going to St Andrews into two or three sentences.

6. Learning the dress code from how everyone else dresses. The rules vary SO much between Edward Jones, the House, and now ADC. No one outright says it–you have to pick up on it from everyone else.

7. It’s SO important to be friendly and talkative and to let people know you. Oh my goodness. I’m so glad that I’m of the extroverted persuasion because if I hadn’t been, this whole project would have been 100% less fun, exciting, and fulfilling. Which leads me to:

8. Planning a project you’ll actually enjoy is so important. I think a lot of the stuff I’m enjoying about my project is totally by chance because I did not plan it as well or as ahead of time as I could’ve. But I have enjoyed these past four weeks like nothing else. But most people find that their senior projects teach them which fields they don’t want to go into–I’ve found quite the opposite. I have so many uber exciting dreams now and I don’t even know what is realistic and I don’t even want to know because the weight of reality is often so burdensome and awfully incorrect. So here I am, sitting on a couch in a really cute brownstone in Brooklyn and I. Absolutely. Cannot. Wait. For the rest of my life.

Today was my first day at the American Design Club in Brooklyn. I’m spending five days with them, helping to organize, set up, and run a pop-up at the Brooklyn Art Expo.

The show is Friday-Sunday, so today we were at the office organizing. The old Navy Yard has been turned into an industrial park, and their offices and workshops are all set up there. We mainly needed to do inventory. We assigned SKU codes to every product that would be sold (there are over 600–they range from necklaces to coasters to light fixtures) and counted everything before we boxed it up to be sure the right number of things were in the Square system.

I also got to use QuickBooks for the first time which was kind of cool because I’ve heard people in the office talking about it for years.

The office is quite small–Dani, who I knew, a builder named Alex, a new employee named Jacqueline, and the owner named Kiel. It’s a really cool, artistic environment. They’re all clearly so creative and have such great taste. It’s a bit of fresh air after four weeks in formal offices.

Today I got some materials to translate. It’s from Land Rover Ventura. The materials is about G2 New discovery. During read the tables I learned the specific name of the auto spare parts for different positions of cars. They do different work of cars. Some knowledges are really important for me and you to know in our real life. I don’t have my own car now but I’ll get it when I move to college. I learned that if you waited in the car while idling the engine. It would hurt the engine and shorten the service life of the engine. Seat in the are with the music and AC turned on but didn’t start the car is possibly make the car run out of battery.