Author: j.kang7

I attended a workshop for the STARR Career center about start ups. It was a workshop about careers in start up companies and what to do to get a job in a start up company. The presentation was done by twins and they talked about the importance of a few skills needed to get a job in a start up company. They also talked about some benefits to working at a start up. Some tips that were given were the importance of networking and being “over prepared” for interviews. Preparing questions to ask the company such as, How much capital have you raised? To help us understand their points they used a slide show with a bunch of pictures that tried to be funny. It was like old people trying to be “down with the times”. Although they did attempt to be humorous with the crowd and it was a little weird, they were in fact engaging and did teach me a lot about working at different size companies. It opened my eyes to new perspectives and learning opportunities. They taught me to focus on communication skills and customer service. To improve yourself to help improve the start up you wish to work at. Overall the experience was enjoyable and I did learn alot from the two. Maybe now in the future I will consider working at a start up opposed to a bigger company. It definitely seems to offer different rewards and has its own value elsewhere. 

I work at a Taco Bell. To put it simply, it’s one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had. Somehow the most rude, disrespectful, and disgusting human beings make their way to Taco Bell and give me the worst of times. But although the place makes my hate for people in general grow, it has also taught me a lot of valuable lessons. For one, it’s taught me how to be patient. I’ve had customers spend 10 minutes at the drive thru window cancelling and re adding items to their order. But no matter how long it takes and how much it frustrates me, my tone has to be the same and I have to take their order with the utmost friendliness. Second, its taught me self-control, that no matter how much a customer is screaming and spitting in my face, I must not and will not ever talk back. But trust me when I say that the temptation is there. It doesn’t matter that I can think of 18 different ways to tell the customer to go fuck themselves, I keep that inside, because sometimes being a professional and an adult is the more important thing to do. And even though customers give me such a hard time, I still tie my apron around my neck and put the hat on and walk to work, and there is good reason for that. Because behind the register is a whole group of people that I no longer consider coworkers but rather, they have become friends. And these friends of mine not only make work fun, but also, they have taught me something invaluable to someone so reserved like myself. That sometimes it’s okay to rely on others. That asking for help doesn’t make you incompetent. That depending on others doesn’t make you weak. In fact, it’s a sign of strength and humility. That if you want to get anywhere in life, you can’t do it alone. Constantly relying only on yourself is a foolish thing to do. And that was something I really needed to learn. 

For my other requirement I went to the Museum of Natural History. I went with a few friends and I won’t lie about it, it wasn’t that fun. There were a few cool things that I was able to see but that was ruined too because of certain circumstances. There was this cool space timeline show thing that you could go and watch but during the whole presentation people kept walking in from the exit area and ruining my immersion. There was this mummy exhibit that was on the fourth floor and it was the only thing that seemed cool to look at. I get up there and it tells me I have to pay to see dead people in glass boxes. No thank you, rather go to google images for that. I would rather have gone to another museum but most of them needed to be paid and I wanted to see the big skeleton dinosaur fossil thing that was in the movie Night at the Museum. I didn’t get to see that because the museum was so hard to navigate. Wanted to see the Teddy Roosevelt horse statue and relive my childhood but they played me. I even went to the marine life section and there was no water. The exhibits were just painted blue. In MY opinion, museum was not worth the commute. The animal statues were cool though. I saw a really cool tiger and snapped a picture

For my student life requirement I decided to attend the UCLA ( United Chinese Language Association ) General interest meeting. I decided to attend this meeting because I was interested in the premise of the club and truthfully I thought it would be a quick way to get rid of my student life requirement. The general interest meeting started off with introductions from the members of the board. They were quick to introduce themselves starting with name, role, then a few quick ways in which they could solidify their “unique” personalities into our heads.

After the introductions we moved on to play some games with the people at the meeting as to get the crowd talking. We played two games If I remember correctly. The first game we played was Google Feud. We split into two teams ( the left side of the room vs the right side ) and battled it out to see who could guess the most common google searches related to the selected theme. It was fun to see the strangeness of google search results on the screen and it made it all the more enjoyable to hear people laugh and talk with each other. The next game we played was “zooooom in”, and the premise was to guess correctly the object on the screen from a close up perspective. Some were definitely impossible to guess but somehow some people in the crowd had figured it out. My only guess was that they were cheating. They just had to be…

When all the games were concluded they brought in food and everyone just stood around eating and talking. Overall I had a good time and everyone was extremely friendly making it more appealing to stay after school and be active at Baruch.