After having worked for the past two weeks and a half for 8 hours everyday, I have to start by summarizing some of what I have learned through the events that I have experienced. Let me describe to you how much I have learned. To begin, through out this internship I have learned more about my writing and proof reading than I have experienced in any of my english classes. The reason has been because I was able to put it into practice by not only translating my colleagues work but also by proof reading numerous of their documents, advertisements and even letters. One important realization that I came up with was how important it is to proof read your work. Proof reading your work is like polishing your artwork, adding an extra layer to top it all of into an amazing art piece.
Moving on, there was one moment through out my time at Perurail that completely struck me. It was when I witnessed a moment in the workspace that was parallel to a moment that I had experienced while working with BlendZ. It was the moment when the head of marketing asked me to accompany her to a meeting with the company designers. As the meeting had just begun the designers were incredibly eager and passionate to show off their handwork done for the company. And then the moment of resemblance hit me. It hit me as if for a few seconds I had just drifted off into a distant memory. I started to see myself in their shoes. Once again feeling the ecstatic flow of happiness in my voice as I handed over my handwork for revision. After revisiting that joyous memory I was back at the meeting table watching as the head of marketing gave them her feedback. She asked if several small but time-consuming details could be changed. And then the memory came back to me, hitting me even harder because I watched as their facial expressions crumble like a piece of paper after an attempt at a drawing. They began to take the feedback as if they were being insulted that there work wasn’t good enough. As this event took place I began to feel the atmosphere of the room to begin to heat itself up into a discussion. Therefore I opened my mouth. Describing to my fellow designers that there work is incredibly well down however there are a few things that needed to change or go because the costumer wouldn’t comprehend. As I related to them by sharing my similar experience at Blendz, they took account every idea and we all corresponded without any arguing. This experience was one that I will uphold as I find myself choosing my profession in the future. Why? Well it is because I have been able to experience different jobs/positions that I have been able to relate and understand other positions better.
0 Comments
Has it ever happened to you when you watch a movie based on a book and you are so intrigued by it that you become persuaded to read the book from the movie or maybe even read a book written by the same author? Well through the summer I watched the movie Gone Girl for the first time while I was visiting San Francsco, California. The movie itself was outstandingly creepy but incredibly planned through. What hit me the most was the amounts of plot twists that a story line could have, especially how effective the plot twists were as a viewer. For example you first begin to hate the husband of the girl, thinking that he is the cause of a lot of negative outcomes in the movie but then you come to the realization that the girl planned everything out and that she is a psychopath. On that note, after being incredibly driven from that movie I became inspired to read a book by the same author: Gillian Flynn. The book I read is named Dark Places. To briefly summarize the intense novel, it is a book based on it's plot twists. However " Gone Girl might be the first of Flynn’s twisty, inky black novels to go the film route, but it’s not going to be the last: Flynn’s Dark Places, a still darker drama that makesGone Girl look relatively tame, will soon hit theaters." Based around the main character, Libby Day, who was part of of a family murder. After years of beleiving that her brother was the killer in the murder of the rest of her family, she was told by a secret society of fans that it could be a possibility that he might be innocent. After Libby Day starts to investigate by visiting her brother who was in jail and she figures out that he actually is innocent. Then from this she starts to find out new clues which lead her to the killer. She later becomes held hostage but in the end finds out the unexpected. Without trying to spoil the book or the ending plot twists, I would highly recommend to read the book if you are interested in books with plot twists and a mysterious vibe to it. As the beginning of this summer was spent for leisure, the second part of this summer is being spent for work. I once heard that if you Work hard play hard - Wiz Khalifa As I just begun my internship at Perurail, a peruvian-british company that is a part of the Belmond group, I was given a list of tasks to complete. Moreover it was like a checklist and my first task was to stalk them in every webpage/social media site that I could and provide them with feedback: comments, suggestions, and my opinion. Although having already looked into them beforehand in order to get an insight on the company that I would be working for, this was like an FBI search for their online prescense. https://www.perurail.com Take a look at my suggestions and comments: Besides having stalked their company, I was also breilfy introduced to the company by this presentation that I am in the midst of correcting because it has a couple errors. Also since I am the intern I have been completing a few favors that my colleagues might be asking for me here and there. Most likely what tends to happen is because of my english skills I am asked to correct someones work or send mails to people in english. The learning that comes with this is that I am actually becoming more aware of my vocabulary, grammer, and the spelling of words.
For example take a look at this email: Dear Mr. ? , Thank you very much for complete our online survey. Your feedback will help us to improve the quality of our services. We noticed that you had a problem in the Purchase & Reservation Process. We apologize for this inconvenience and we inform you that the Booking Department is working immediately on it to fix the problem. Furthermore, we want to understand better the problem that you mentioned about the innacurate information received of our train stations: Urubamba and Ollantaytambo. Please, could you explain it to us? Thank you very much, ? Now take a look at the correction and you can tell the difference of how I have become more aware of my word usage and gramatical errors; although I still have to work on my word usage problems and my gramatical error problems. Dear Mr. ? , Thank you so much for completing our online survey. Your feedback will help us improve the quality of our services. However, we noticed that you had a problem in the Purchase & Reservation Process. We apologize for this inconvenience and we inform you that the Booking Department is currently working on fixing the problem. Furthermore, we want to better understand the problem that you breifly mentioned about the innacurate information received from our train stations: Urubamba and Ollantaytambo. Therefore could you please further explain to us the situation in order for us to fully comprehend what happened? Thank you, ? Now my next task in an interesting one. I have to go to Larcomar and pertend to be a client and go up to the Perurail shop and test the employees there on their company and not only that but make sure they are welcoming. I am excited to see this in action because it if the employees do not a good their job will not be harmed but I will be like a spy for my mentor. Moreover, I will play with my indimidation skills in order to try and crack the employees down as if they were an egg. Stay tuned on twitter to see how this goes, the post will come in either today or tomorrow.
Wow, time really does fly. Surprisingly, I am already half way through my senior year and soon I’ll be off to college. That still being the future, I am looking back at this semester and my performance through out; however, I know there are many aspects I still have to work on in order to achieve the best of my learning potential. Moreover, in class last week we had a couple days set up to figuring out our grades. The way in which we figure out our grades is through an activity we do called straight talk. Straight talk is when we all huddle up in a group and begin discussing about each others grades. We ask ourselves what grade we deserve for each class and why. Although based on how we performed through out the semester. We also give each other the opportunity to challenge ourselves to become better learners. In my case, for this semester I was challenged to improve in several aspects of my learning. How was I challenged to improve my learning? First off, in regards to my english grade I was challenged to try and take more advantage of myself being a native english speaker. I was told that I needed to start portraying it more in my writing and in my presentations. In that case I have to practice my creative writing skills and not only that but my presenting skills in the sense that I need to give myself enough time to have it down perfectly. Moreover I need to practice to play with words, have fun with them. I need to become Shakespeare, I need to play with the words as if they were an instrument and I am the musician. Moving on I was also told, rather than being challenged that I needed to look at people and focus more when they were speaking to me because at times I space out completely. Realizing this I know that it happens but at times I feel like it is inevitable. However, in order to fix this struggle I feel like I need to read more. The reason is that also when I read I have problems concentrating and focusing on just reading because I am so used to multi tasking and thinking incredibly large amounts of thought in my head. Therefore, if I continue to read more it’ll help me practice my concentration skills and improve my vocabulary. Going back to english, even though I was told that my voice as a writer is exemplified and I can tell a story pretty well. I was challenged to try and reflect more. That even after mentioning examples I need to prove more of my understanding towards the anecdote. In this case as challenging as it may be it is something I have to continue working on, reflecting on an anecdote I explain in order to show the true valuable importance of it. Something that was said and truly caught my attention during the feedback session was that someone told me that despite my love for art, as in painting in drawing, I should try and explore more of art with words, as in poetry, etc. The reason behind the astonishment for myself was that ever since I was a little kid I loved poetry. I would always read different poems, learn about it in school and sometimes even write my own poetry. Take these two poems for example: 1) Life is like a waterfallLife is like a waterfall, as we are the water. Reaching a point in our lives where we hit rock bottom. However, we find ourselves flowing along the river, blindly. Falling Tumbling moving along Into the endless possibilities of what lies ahead... 2) Life in unityThey might be having the nuke while we are having the bomb but in the end they will be asking why were they so wrong! Why were they wrong? They were wrong because they were acting where they don’t belong All along we question, Life is a question with a quest that we must overcome, Its a test to see what we could become You must see that every possibility can only be accomplished in unity. Now forever u must see That together brings now sorrow but together don't bring me Forever no tomorrow but forever with me Now Together we will show them how we came to be It started with destiny and ended up with happily. Besides only the aspect of english we also looked upon how I was doing in the business terms. In that regard I need to start taking more initiative. Also I need to move away from being myopic with my fruit characters, I need to innovate— take a risk. I need to be more creative in the initiatives I take. Therefore, I was challenged to step away from my fruits and design different ones. That is my plan for the christmas sale, to make different faced fruits, to change/spice things up a bit.
Finally in terms of my media straight talk feedback, we will find out tomorrow :) A couple of weeks ago we realized as a company that we were quenching for competition. Therefore, we split up into two even groups to start taking on different days to sell smoothies. We realized that competition is somewhat healthy and it could motivate us more to try and sell more smoothies because competition is a way of survival between us humans; we had to see which group would prevail and survive the smoothie sale. Since the beginning our ancestors competed in order for survival. Now a days we compete as well, also because of survival but simply because the world has become much more competitive. We might not always notice when we compete but we do it all the time; wether it is at the office over who gets the promotion, or at home when siblings are trying to get their mothers or fathers attention, or even when playing sports and trying to win the game. The point is that our earth, is a competitive world. Moreover, BlendZ company has decided to branch off into two distinct groups in order for some friendly competition. Let me present to you Group A: And Group Awesome B: This past week was our first sale as a competitive group awesome B. Our theme was around the no shave november. Therefore, we were No Shave MoblendZ. Our ads for our campaign, the marketing of it, the competition we set-up for our customers, it all played out as we had planed. Our theme was BlendZ with no shave november; in that case, No Shave MoblendZ. However, we were faced a terrifying hard to prediction situation. The weather... Although competition happens all the time, I really felt like it gave a little extrinsic motivation. Especial because during our sale on thursday we were affected by the damp and rainy weather. This caused our desirability to decrease slightly because cold drinks are mostly refreshing on warm days. Moreover, since we were out in the midst of the competition disadvantaged many of us were motivated to still try and win the friendly competition. On that note we made smoothies the fastest we have ever made them causing our costumes to receive their joyous smoothie quicker. Also, myself in charge of our no shave November challenge, we pushed ourselves to engage more with our community. In doing so we took pictures of cool beards or mustaches and girls with the longest hair. In the end a girl and a guy one a free smoothie and resulted to have many costumers engage and participate in the challenge. *In the end 10% of our revenue went to the Wish Factory organization in order to help children cancer patients in Peru. Competition is not so bad after all :) Finally they arrived... After having spent numerous hours consulting, finding, and bargaining with different suppliers I got the hats and the shirts in time for the Bazaar sale as I had planed the weekend before. My original goal was to have aprons and hats. The problem with the aprons, however, was that we only needed a small amount of them. Mostly all of the suppliers that I contacted told me that they needed a large quantity of aprons in order to make them. In that case, I compromised by designing and getting shirts to be made for the crew and for those who are volunteers. Lucky enough, I sent the shirts to be made by a brand name store here in Peru named Joaquin Miro because of an important contact. Being made by a name brand store influenced the quality of the cloth used for the shirts immensely, take a look. Made separately were the BlendZ hats. As you can see below Reflecting upon the designs and creation of my work I want to reiterate the fact that in school sometimes you don't feel so proud of your work. You might sometimes feel limited on what you can do and what you can create, at least that was how I felt before the IA. Now however I am creating beautiful work that I am extremely proud of. For example the hats and shirts. The process to get them was difficult and full of faltered decisions, but in the end led me to work that I want to show off to you guys.
Because like Paul walker once said, "It's not about working anymore, its about doing work I can be proud of." I can truly say I am proud of my work with the hats and shirts. However, my next step or goal is to get the little amount of aprons that we need. In order to do so I am contacting the options I still have and if not my plan B is to go visit the stores and try to bargain better in person. Inspiration is the key to many doors. It is one of the many ways we motivate ourselves as humans; moreover, it is what drives us to the mind-boggling moments of reality. The way we inspire ourselves or even each other to complete the un-completable . Inspiration can be unpredictable, it doesn't just come off tree's, but when it appears it can be harnessed. It can be harnessed like a wild horse running into the endlessness of the wild. And once it is harnessed, it can ignite an astonishing velocity to the amount of beautiful work that can be created.
This weekend I witness beautiful work. First hand, I am proud to say. Although beautiful work occurs all the time, I was honestly left in awe by the immense power of questions and answers that could be brought about by a single movie. Keep in mind that I have watched a ton of movies, so that says something. The movie was Interstellar and although it does have its flaws, like many movies do, I was mind-boggled by the end of it because of all the pending questions I had. However, the movie responded several of them after profoundly discussing it with my brother and cousins. Getting back to my point, after having watched the movie I felt inspired to read about space and wanting to know more about its explanations, mysteries, and misconceptions. I even wanted to now about space travels; moreover, the successions and the failures of it. I basically wanted to know everything about space because of the movie. Even being fictional to some extent, the movie left me inspired with a motif to learn a topic for my own satisfaction. The deliriousness to myself, however, was the thought of me being interested and contemplating over a topic I never imagined myself ever daring to integrate with. It was as if I had almost been tricked, consciously, by the movie to become left with much inspiration. After having contemplated the movie a few more hours I realized that that same inspiration is what is needed more in school. That specific drive to push you into areas of new learnings for your own satisfaction is incredibly important. That same drive is what I believe should be the new foundation for schools because a school without inspiration is like a dried out flower in the middle of the summer. Now this doesn't necessarily mean that inspiration needs to be found through a movie, that was just an example, it more-or-less means inspiration should be provided by in schools everywhere through different procedures. Proud to be a part of a marvelous example of where self-inspiration can come about is in the Innovation Academy. However, since we have recently been working on our smoothie company ,BlendZ, I realize that although we are eager to finalize a physical place on campus and to sell smoothies we have lacked that sort of inspiration. We have been too myopic on our directorships and researching. BlendZ is a result of our entrepreneurial learning, but we as a company needed more autonomy to sit down and spill the good feedback and bad feedback of our habits through out the work space. Although we were in a delicate place as a company, we came to the realization that not reaching our full potential and not taking the extra mile to complete the race was a crucial factor to our sluggish accomplishments for the business. Therefore, as only students we sat down and inspired each other to ride the horse into the endlessness of the wild and ignite the astonishing velocity to the beautiful work we are in the midst of finalizing. "Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working" ~ Picasso
Beyond having created these characters, designing on top of them has been an experience. However, I was able to put them to the test. As BlendZ we have been selling at our school, mostly in the high school area; however, this time we tried something new out by selling to the middle schoolers. When selling to the younger kids, I was in charge of playing the game of tic-tac-toe, however, the X and the O were my fruit characters. Full of glee after noticing, I realized that the children loved my designs because at times they almost left the game with there game piece. They told me they enjoyed how playful they were and to keep making more, I felt proud of my designs. Continuing the success to that day we sold out on both of our flavors. Although besides the sweet success, upon reflecting as a company we noticed we had many problems. Jotting them down these are what we came up with. Reflections after Hallow Blendz:
This past week has been a good one for BlendZ. As it was parent teacher conference tuesday and wednesday, we sold smoothies. Proudly we sold out completly out of one flavor and almost selling out on the other flavor. We sold roughly over 150 smoothies. However this all took and lot of preparing and dominating before. Now, instead of splitting up in different groups to work on projects, the crew has all split up as different directors; myself being the director of art and design. We found that this new shift in management would suit us more. Although before out conference sell out, I had 3 pending projects that I tackled during the process. 1) Although the logo was relatively finished I had to make sure everything was in-tact and with no mistakes because are logo is what would represent us in many different ways. Therefore, after finishing it completely I sent it out to my fellow directors. Hence, our logo finally being done and applied into the many different areas. 2) Once the logo was done my next focus was to make signs and posters for the conference. In doing so, I found myself adding onto my fruit character family with a new fruit: a blueberry. While creating it I realized that I was following a similar creation wight the fruits I made. This not only made me feel proud, but also really engaged into finishing it as quickly and as detailed as possible. After finishing the signs and posters for the our full day conference sell, I moved onto my next task. 3) I had been thinking about this project for a while because it is truly an important one for the company: hats. We need hats for two main reasons: sanitation and style. Therefore, I created several designs in order to present and ask for feedback to my fellow innovators; however, this time I presented my information differently than when I present the logo. Why? Because when presenting the logo I not only realized my own faults, but I learned and pivoted from them. In that case, I started by creating a survey which could automatically record all the data that the entire BlendZ crew would fill out. This resulted in and easier base of data to then finalize my choices to my final presentation of the hats. When creating the survey I knew this time that I had to imagine I was the person taking the survey and depict every hat option that I would think of while taking it; in order for the visualization of the hat choices to be heightened. While I waited for my peers to complete the survey I didn’t just sit down and wait, I began researching. Looking for a supplier to make the hats and the aprons that we needed for the BlendZ crew. To start off I found 3 suppliers. Which led me to calling each one to figure out a price range for the customized hats and aprons. After bargaining for about half an hour with them for a good price and a good quantity I was able to get a relatively good price: 4 dollars per hat and we would purchase 20 hats. This led me to create another pending project: email the supplier. Once the bargaining was completed I confirmed that all my survey data was complete. Leading me to finalizing the hat design and presenting three options to my class. Those three options revolved around the helpful data I got from my survey. However, that presentation and group talk really finalized our choice which I can say we are all very enthusiastic for. Not only was the hat design finished, but after coming in one saturday with the BlendZ crew to work on things the apron design was also done. During the process of designing I was able to learn how to literally take every idea out from my head and put it onto adobe illustrator or a doe photoshop. Honesty, those two applications I can proudly say are becoming more and more known to me each day. Although there is always room to improve and learn new things from the applications I have been able to utilize them in a manner that I never saw myself doing so. Check out the finally hat and apron options below :) |
BloggerMy name is Stefan Stangl and I am originally from San Francisco, California. Currently, I am senior at Colegio Franklin Delano Roosvelt in Lima, Peru. My passions are sports and art. Personal: @Stefan6 School: @fdrinnovationacademy ♫Tweet me ♫
@StefanStangl6 CategoriesArchives
June 2015
|