Freshman Seminar Fall 17 LC09

   After attending Baruch Voice, I learned a lot from each individual, also Hearing different monologue in my fro seminar class I can relate to some of their anecdote . For example how we struggle as a freshman at Baruch, how we have the same background and the hobbies that we have in common. This event is really meaningful to host because we get to know each other and as a freshman we get to share our feelings. I like my classmate Jeremy’s monologue because it was really creative, he manage to put his short monologue into rap. His rap is funny because his rap and Kevin’s beat were not on the same channel but overall his rap was good. Our class voted Jeremy to attend the Baruch voice because we all liked the humor and the creativity. Unfortunately I had to go somewhere that day so I left Baruch Voice half way. Even though I didn’t hear but I’m pretty sure he did a great job. When I was there there was a girl, who wrote a poem for her monologue which I think it’s interesting. Overall I think Baruch Voice is a very purposeful event. This event can help freshmen to know each other more and challenge each individual’s creativity by giving us a assignment writing an Monologue for our freshman seminar class. This is my last blog post and this semester is coming to an end. I would like to thanks Jean for all the advises.

On November 16, I attended the Start-Up Tech Fair hosted by Hillel at Baruch College. At this event, there were several entrepreneurs who shared their success stories. In addition, they offered tips on how to start your own business and help it become successful. The owner of Celsius, an app that allows you to lend others money and make interest off it, had something that really struck out to me. He talked about failure and how he had failed multiple times. However, the strength to keep going is what allows someone to achieve something. He said that you will fail in anything you do, but if you are determined, the failures only hone you to become stronger. He also said that what we learn from our business classes in college won’t help us in our business career. He mentioned that the two classes that we will really help us in our everyday life down the road, are psychology and communications. I agree because these classes allow us to understand behaviors and communicate effectively. These entrepreneurs were recruiting students for internships that day. Luckily I had brought a couple copies of my resume and had given them to two or three of the companies I was interested in. In addition, this event allowed me to network with these successful individuals in the business and technology industry. Furthermore, I was able to meet more students who had similar goals as me, and had created many friendly connections. My father has owned a cell phone store in Queens for over twenty years. Recently, the past couple of years of retail business has been very slow because of the shifting market and buyers. I had listed the inventory online at consumer platforms such as eBAY and Amazaon. I was surprised to see how fast most of the inventory had sold. I remember shipping up to fifty phones a day to separate buyers. I think that currently and as we move on into the future, technology and business will continue to become more intertwined. Therefore by attending this fair, I was able to learn more skills and receive advice on how to continue to conduct business online.

On Thursday, September 14th, I went to t Baruch Fall 2017 Club Fair with my friend Tiffany Cheung. I decided to go to the Club Fair because I felt like I should get more involved on campus as well as making my future semester plans. Since we both have a long break, I thought I might as well used this opportunity to find a club to join for next semester. It was also a nice way to use my gap hours to be productive. So I dragged my friend with me to the fair.

We went to the Club Fair to find out what clubs are offered, hoping that something will interest us. Tiffany had no idea what she liked, which was not surprising. I knew what I liked to do for clubs, since I have been in a lot of clubs in high school. However, college clubs are very different. I didn’t have to interview to join a club in high school nor did they have that many options. So in the end I was also indecisive.

We took a quick run around the club tables to see what was there. I saw a mock trial club that was hosted by Joe, Dan, and Sadia, who was handing out the flyers. What caught my interest was the free food. I suggested Tiffany to join the Women in Business club whereas I went to the Lexicon club. I was involved in my high school’s yearbook club, so I was thinking of helping Baruch. So I went over there, signed up on the mailing list and took a sample of their book. Then I saw Baruch’s Hack club, which was for coding and I also signed up for that as well. Overall, it was a nice experience to see what Baruch had to offer and what I can join during next semester.

 

On November 1st, I attended the NABA Mentorship kick-off event. This event introduced the NABA mentorship program, as selected mentors and mentees would have a chance to network and learn more about the program. The kick-off event also laid out the foundation of what is expected from the mentors and mentees year long, and how we should work together to create goals and plans towards attaining an internship for the summer. It was a great experience to meet all the various professionals at the event.  This event also gave mentees an opportunity to choose their prospective mentors for the year long program. There were a lot of mentors to choose from, all from a plethora of different backgrounds and fields. Many of the mentors were recent Baruch graduates, so they understand what is required to get a job in todays world. As of yet, I don’t know what I want to major in, but I’m sure this mentorship program will help me with that decision. I’ll also be able to receive a guide on how to attain internships and valuable work experience. Hopefully the relationships I make in this program will be life long, and I know I’ll receive a lot of insight on what it takes to accomplishing my career goals. 

For the first time in maybe five years, I visited a museum. This museum trip was a part of my history class. The trip was on a Friday morning and about half the class present to attend the trip. Since we were studying about the Egyptians and Mesopotamians at the time, we visited the exhibits for each. We went the MET for the exhibits. We started with the Egyptian exhibit, which sadly took the entire trip or hour to go through. The museum provided us with a much better representation of the effect the people have on us today. They have left many traces and clues to how they have lived in the past and their entire or most of their history. While in this part of the museum, we saw many clay figurines show casing Egyptian life at the time. We also saw many clay tablets with hieroglyphs inscribed into them. The papyrus with hieroglyphs have disintegrated a long time ago and didn’t preserve as well as the clay tablets. We also saw the mascot for the MET, a little blue hippo figurine named William. There were also showcases filled with ornaments and jewelry the people wore back in the day. However, I found the statues of a pharaoh the most interesting. There were many statues of the same pharaoh throughout the same room. There were also large statues of the ancient Egyptian gods erected outside the room as well. After this trip, we were instructed to find an object the teacher didn’t talk about and write an essay on it. After walking around the museum, I laid my eyes on a giant statue outside. Once I gotten close to this statue, I realized it was Cleopatra’s needle. I was so amazed on how they were able to move such an object here, I decided to do my essay on this. Overall, this trip was very exciting.

For my third blog post, I attended a networking event with IBM hosted by the Muslim Student Association Club. In the event, the speaker discussed the importance of networking and how it is imperative to keep a certain type of mindset while going to networking event. She discussed how you shouldn’t go to an event with the mindset that you are going to talk to one certain person/ company and be open to your options. It is better to have a well-rounded resume but when talking to a professional a person shouldn’t go off on a tangent by listing everything on their resume.

Then, we broke off into little groups into three with one IBM professional. The professionals at the event were recent graduates and this was something I liked because since we were so close in age it was easier to talk to them. The professional in my group was Nikita Mary Singareddy. She was a recent graduate from Columbia University and she showed us her Linkedin. She told me that it is important to keep an updated Linkedin and how sometimes professionals might just search you up at Linkedin. She told me that since I was a freshman, I should start looking for internships for the next semester.

One takeaway I had from this event was that when talking to a professional, it is better to ask them some personal questions like how was your day, what did you think of this job you had. One joke that the lady made was successful people love talking about themselves and you should use that to your advantage at times. After this event, I made a Linkedin. This workshop helped me realize how I should deal with professional at networking events which would help me in my career path.

This past Thursday I attended the Start-Up Tech Fair hosted by Hillel at Baruch College. There I networked with the industry’s leading power players in the tech field. The experience was like no other. One particular company I spoke with aimed to revolutionize advertisements. This company, ChatDynamo are experts at growing chatbot audiences. Chatbots are automated messages generated by a computer to stimulate conversation between itself and the human consumer. I enjoyed speaking with the CEO of ChatDynamo the most out of each company representative at the Start-Up Tech Fair. I also had the opportunity to meet other students involved within the Hillel community that I didn’t know prior to the fair. I made a strong decision in deciding to attend the fair which surely paid off. I aim to now build upon the connections I created and attempt to gain an internship out of one of the companies I envision myself within. I also aspire to keep strong the friendly relationships I created with the Hillel students I met. The advantage of attending Baruch College is that the school provides many opportunities to meet with business professionals. By having a hard working office of Student Life that works behind the scenes to allow clubs such as Hillel, the college is able to permit networking events weekly. Earlier in the semester I struggled to envision my future as a student of Baruch College. Gradually I’ve become more comfortable and have began to see all the opportunities the College provides. After Thursday’s event, I am proud to say that I am a Baruch College student looking to prepare for his future. Thank you Karl and Jean for your continued support from day one. As my mentors you shaped me not only as a student but as a member of the Baruch College community.

Today I visit the Starr Career Development Center in order to go over my resume and check if it was alright. I went because I needed something to write about for this post and didn’t really have anything else going on. It was pretty hard trying to find something to writ about for a career related blog and then while I was walking past the Starr office it hit me and I went in. I was pretty naive thinking I could just walk in there without any appointment and without any thing on me to show them. So I then figured out the walk-in times and I decided to fix up my resume. My resume was pretty good because someone already helped me fix it up and I had the right format and I already took out all the odd jobs I’ve done in the past. I also took out the jobs that I had only been at for a short time and made my resume one page.

So to fill up some space I’ll first talk about why I had to take so much work experience out of my resume. It is mainly because I started working way before I was legally able to work and I’ve always held multiple jobs at a time while also filling in for people and I’ve been a temp once or twice as well. So yea, that’s that. When I came in with my resume it ended up being pretty quick since I had so much done already. They educated me on several aspects of the whole resume charade like making sure it’s always on special resume paper and the sort. They looked at my resume and fixed some things here and there, mainly being small mistakes and I was out as quick as I came in which was pretty cool because that means that I did it right on my own.

For my third and final post, I will be talking about my experiences at the Hillel Start-Up Fair that I went to last week. I was very excited for this fair because I wish one day to start a company and to be an entrepreneur so I couldn’t wait to talk to CEOs and try to consume as much advice and information as I could possibly digest. The event began with a panel of 6 respective CEO’s answering questions that the moderator had asked them. They talked about their most significant failures and how when looking back what they may have done differently. They articulated on what they thought we the students should be focusing and studying on if we wanted to be successful entrepreneurs. One of the CEOs said something that really resonated with me and which will undoubtedly follow me throughout my professional life. He said that in life people could follow professions that they don’t necessarily enjoy doing, but do them anyway because they would have the highest percent chance to make the most money and to become “successful.” He continued by saying that when he is much older like in his 80’s and looking back on his life, he doesn’t want to look back and see that he was unhappily doing something that he loathed to do just because it may have made him very wealthy or “successful’. He finished by saying that 100 out of 100 times he would rather look back on his life and be happy that he took the risk on something that he loved to do even if he hadn’t had reached his goals or even had failed. After hearing that, I totally agreed. When I look back on my life when I’m older, I’m not going to care about the money and materialistic things, I’m going to want to look back and know that I did something that I loved to do even if I didn’t make as much money or failed. This message is especially important in this field: Startups. When upwards of 80% of startups fail, I know I must go into this field knowing these percentages and realize the likely results, however, I know what’s important to me is doing something that I love to do and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.