Freshman Seminar Fall 17 LC05

Blog post #3

Career Blog Post

So I’ve talked about this during my introduction speech in our favorite class, communications. In case you didn’t remember I am taking lessons to receive a pilot’s license and I want to have a career in that field. I would specifically like to be an airline private or a private pilot meaning that I basically fly rich people around while I work for a company. Its essentially the same as being a limo driver but with airplanes and tips obviously are awesome. The thing is that in order to have a job like that you need to have a lot of education. You need to have 4 different licenses before you can even get paid for flying and 9 different ones to become an airline pilot. Each license is a prerequisite of the next so the material you have to know for each test is basically cumulative. Also, each license can take between 40 hours of flying time to 1,500, so it takes years to get to where I want to be. You can clearly see that achieving what I want isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Now that I’ve summed up my career, how does this relate with school? It completely does not relate to my major which is finance, or at least I haven’t really made the connection yet. It does relate to my school life however. I have to travel back home to long island pretty much every weekend in order to keep up with my flying lessons. Having 5 classes and then actively pursuing piloting takes up pretty much all the time I have so balancing everything is a skill I need to work on. I’ve gotten better at it throughout the semester and even though its difficult, it’s definitely worth it.

For my monologue, I crafted five haikus about Baruch, its neighborhood, and me.

 

I see dogs around

And I say hello to them

As leaves fall to ground.

 

The crisp wind whistles

Flip flop flip flop, go my shoes

Don’t ask about it.

 

Flowers fade in place

Crap all over the sidewalk

And yet – I am home.

 

The birds have gone south

And yet I remain in place.

I ain’t got no wings.

 

Bernard Baruch – bronze

And yet chilling on a bench.

Afterlife? Not too bad.

I’m honestly not sure what to talk about here – so I’ll settle for my favorite part of the semester so far. I’ve got a pretty weird relationship with academics, so I’m as surprised as anyone to find a class that I actually love – Manuel Rodeiro’s Intro to Philosophy. Now, there’s a few factors here – I love theoretical nonsense, and philosophy’s practically nothing but. I hate busywork, and it’s really difficult to assign busywork if you don’t assign homework whatsoever – the only work needed for Philosophy is readings, which are barely work, considering I’m reading something I enjoy. My only complaint is the relative lack of discussion, but I guess it makes sense considering it’s more history-oriented, it’s an intro class, and the curriculum is time-limited enough as is, so with that in mind, I’m not sure I’ve got any complaints with it, actually. Of course, that’s balanced by the amount I could whine about the other classes, but I don’t think this is quite the time or place. Over all, the purpose of the class is just a historical overview of the more prominent/influential Western philosophers, segmented into bits by topic – we started out with metaphysics and ontology for the first half, and now we’re on to political philosophy. I was a bit more fond of the first half, so far, but we’re not quite done yet, so I suppose that could change. Still, though, in large part what I like about it is the professor’s lecture style – he doesn’t speak just to hear his own voice, and he’s good at explaining the stuff he’s teaching. Sounds like a bit of a low bar, I know, but it’s apparently very hard to meet, in my experience. Anyway, enough implicit ragging on my profs – I’m really happy with the class, like I said, and though I don’t think it’ll push me into a philosophy concentration, it’s really helpful to have a class like it to temper the flaws of my others.

So – career. I’ve got no clue what I want to do yet – or, more accurately, too many contradicting clues – so I’m gonna talk about something I’ve already done. Around the start of this year – I think that’s when it was, at least – I spent a few days in what was probably my most interesting job. I was a hand for the lighting crew on an exhibition held at Grounds for Sculpture in New Jersey, which is, as the name might suggest, a sculpture park. It started as an atelier founded by Seward Johnson (of the Johnson and Johnson Johnsons, which is where most of the money came from), and the exhibition I worked on was about his history and, by extension, that of the space. It was the first serious lighting gig I’d worked – after a year or two of doing tech on and off in high school – and, while I can’t say it was fun (I spent a whole day cutting colored plastic into lens covers), it was definitely an interesting and rewarding experience. It really reinforced the value, to me, of learning through experience – all the how-tos and instruction manuals in the world mean nothing compared to an hour of expert-supervised practice. Obviously, there’s fields where theory and practice are one and the same, so this isn’t a universal truth, but more and more I find myself questioning the value of pure study.  Still, though, introspective crap aside, I’m really glad to have had the opportunity I did – it allowed me an entirely different perspective, and there’s nothing better than a new perspective to help you fill out your understanding of something. I’m pretty sure it’s not the career path I’d want to take in the true long-term, now, but some of the knowledge and skills involved are essentially universal – I learned a lot about working within a team & within the limitations of a space, and a little bit about social engineering – the subtle kind, the sort that’s present in any workplace, any unequal space.

Recently I went to a Hack4Baruch event – they’re a tech-focused club who’ve run a variety of events this semester, but the one I went to was a talk with Sean Reed. Mr. Reed was originally a physicist, but he’s worn a great many hats, and the one he discussed here was his recent forays into machine learning. Before I discuss the talk itself, I just want to say that the whole atmosphere of the event was really chill, which was nice, and there was just the right amount of people there that the room didn’t feel overcrowded, but it didn’t feel too empty either. As for the talk itself – I honestly can’t recall how long it went, which I guess is a testament to how natural it felt. Mr. Reed discussed his recent project, a neural network dedicated to language processing that he’d fed the entire text of Frankenstein – in order to do so, however, he first took an impromptu poll (vote by hands) of what kind of level of knowledge people had about neural networks, and spent a good while going through the concept from bottom to top – starting with the most basic programming frameworks and libraries involved. I appreciated this greatly, because while I’ve got cursory knowledge in programming and in AI, prior to this I was pretty much in the dark about the layer (or, as it turns out, layers) in between there. After the explanation, he showed us a couple interesting examples – his project’s development over generations, and an image-recognition network along with the specific workings of that. There was also a site that had a graphical representation/simulation of a small network, showing how various algorithms or numbers of active neurons/layers affected the outcome and generation of the network. Over all, I was really happy with how the event went, and signed up for their mailing list.

 

The Difference Between High School and College

Now that I’m halfway done with my first semester of college, I can accurately reflect upon how my life has changed. I never realized how much of my time was previously dedicated to school until I entered Baruch. The seven classes I had which would meet daily were transformed into five that meet twice a week. This greatly reduced my workload and although we go through material at a much quicker pace, it is still less hectic than high school. Since I have fewer classes, I have much more free time during my day, and throughout my week. Instead of having half of my day taken up by education, I am now able to choose how I allocate that time. I work outside of school, allowing myself to earn a little spending cash since city life can be costly. The main difference in my life however, is location. I have lived in New York City for most of my life, but never really had a reason to venture outside of my home borough of Brooklyn. Once I began commuting to Baruch daily, I realized just how much of my city I hadn’t experienced. This revelation encouraged me to spend more time in Manhattan and explore. I visited many popular food spots, and some that are hidden gems. I feel like a tourist in my own city, but I’m glad Baruch finally gave me the opportunity to really live my life.

Whenever I sit home alone, I think about what I want to do with my life, and how working at footlocker is going to help me in the future. I work at Footlocker and I LOVE working there. I find it very hard to balance my school life and my work life sometimes. I love working at Footlocker because it gives me a chance to meet new people, connect with people, and help people. This is essentially what I want to do for my career- which is HR management. When I asked my cousin’s whether or not I should stay at Footlocker, she told me yes. She said this is a great way to start my career, even though it’s not what I want to do. Starting at the bottom and working your way to the top is something that everyone should do. And working at Footlocker is a great way to start. Nobody ever starts at the top right away.
On the days that I do have work, I will always be in a rush. Right after school, I go straight to work, and I have to eat on the train ride. After work, I go straight home and I eat and then I shower and then I do my homework. I can probably finish this around 11-12. To balance things out, sometimes I would do my homework on the days before, or I do my homework on the weekends, even though they’re due a week later.

I took the Universum Career Test to gain a better understanding of which companies would be an ideal fit for my Major. I narrowed my company choices to Google, Groupon, Goldman Sachs, NASA, Morgan Stanley, or J.P. Morgan. It helped me narrow my career interests to companies that would be the best fit for my skills and experiences. Furthermore, it gave me greater insight of the variety of companies that relate to my career ambitions in the future. It also inspired me to look for other companies I might want to intern at during my second or third year at Baruch. Now, I have a definitive idea where I want my career to be like in the near future.

After spending all weekend watching youtube tutorials and trying to do practice questions, I knew I wouldn’t be able to understand the calculus material fully on my own. Because I knew I wouldn’t be able to get a good score on the test, I resorted to tutoring. Last month, I stopped by the SAAC Tutoring Center to get help. When I came in, the nice lady behind the desk gave me information on how to schedule an appointment and I quickly made an account on WCO and proceeded to signing up for an hour tutoring session the following day.

Came Monday, October 16 at 5pm, and I found myself at the SAAC center with my notebook full of notes and laptop already logged into web assign. I had signed up with a guy named Reyhan, so I went inside and looked for his name tag. At first, I didn’t really know how the whole tutoring thing worked at Baruch but then as time went on, I got comfortable with it. We did many practice questions and Reyhan explained every step really well. The hour went by pretty fast and before I knew it, the session was over and I had finally understood every topic on my calculus test the next day.

The SAAC Tutoring Center is a very useful resource for students at Baruch.  I now find myself there before every calculus quiz and test that I have and I’m very thankful for the help and will continue to go there whenever needed.

 

 

 

I knew coming into college was going to be confusing time for me because I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life in terms of a career. Luckily, after talking to a couple of upper class-men, I was given a sense of direction and an understanding as to why it’s so important to start planning your career early. I have a resume but most of it is just a bunch of lies to make myself look better. The first step I have to take is to create a resume that isn’t built off of lies which is a lot harder than I thought. My format was incorrect and the things I included weren’t necessary.

The next step I have to take is to gain some experience with finance related work. Last week, I went to the Starr Career Development Center to see what its all about. I think it’s really cool that Baruch has it own department that helps it’s students find internships and job. Instead of competing against all the students across the country, I’m only competing with those in Baruch. Hopefully soon enough I’ll be able to secure my first internship and gain some experience in finance-related jobs.