Adventure to the White House

As you are aware, if you read my last post this weekend I wanted to get to the White House! Granted, this was not for the tour or anything, just to see the outside and all of that stuff. Well on Saturday in mid-afternoon after an adventure to the grocery store to buy some much needed food, Burke and I headed out to find the White House. Now this should have been relatively easy considering I had directions....


So we took the Metro out to Farragut West, which the internet informed me was the closest Metro stop to the White House. This part was correct, it was the other directions that got us into trouble. We were wandering around for about 25 minutes, when we stumbled upon the National Geographic Museum, we figured, hey it's nice out and still relatively early, let's see what it's like. We went through the two exhibits they had running, one was on the Samurai culture of Japan, and the other was all about the Titanic. Both were extremely interesting and informative. We even got to see a woman perform the traditional music of Japan on a koto (also known as the Japanese Zither). Sadly in the Samurai exhibit we were not allowed to take any photos so I cannot share those with you. But on my facebook page there are some from the Titanic exhibit for those interested. After this we decided to really try and find the White House.


Yet again we ran into some trouble, we just started wandering around and passed by some cool embassies, Peru, Chile, Trinidad and Tobago, and even Uzbekistan (which Burke stepped foot in, officially....without a passport!). After this Burke was a little tired from all the walking as was I by this point, so he decided to see if his phone would give us directions. It did, and it was to the correct location so we finally found the White House. (We later discovered that my directions were like backward, instead of turning right on a street it would have us turn left.) I'm not really sure how that worked out, but oh well. We found the White House! And I got a few photos of it, and luckily it was a nice day outside so even though we were a little hot, it was not too humid.


As for today, well I'm not sure what it was, I woke up and was feeling under the weather so sadly I did not get to adventure today, which I am extremely disappointed about. Although I did do some research for a bunch of random things, and made a list of things that I want to get to here in the near future, most notably I want to get to the Chinese Embassy, so that I can "go to China" before I really go to China. Some people may call this lame, but I think it's really cool that technically by stepping onto the ground of an embassy you are in their country. Anyways that's all for now, luckily I am feeling a little better, and tomorrow I have programming. So I'll keep you all updated!

Work, work, work

Hello everyone, I hope you are all doing well. As you can guess from the title of this post I have not done much other than work. Now granted it's a lot of different work, work for internship, work for my class, and work for programming. Although today I should be able to get out and enjoy myself for a bit I'm going to try and see the White House, not the tour today, just take photos of the outside and such. I do plan to sign up for the actual tour, although I'm not sure when yet. I need to think about that. Anyways back to the recap of this week. Internship has been going well, I'm enjoying all the work I am doing. Yesterday I worked on changing the colors of two separate logos for six hours, now if you are wondering what took so long, it's because I had to change the color pixel by pixel in Microsoft Paint. When I went to bed last night as I closed my eyes I still saw the pixels and that red color I was changing them into. So as you can guess I was really focused on the project, considering the image was burned into my mind.

Well programming is not too stressful, it's mostly just getting all the pieces of the portfolio done on time. Luckily I do not have anything due this week. That's because this coming week I have to go learn how to make a resume and cover letter, I don't mind the cover letter part because I have never really learned that, mostly just taught myself. As for the resume, well I find that kind of redundant considering we needed a resume to apply to the Washington Center, and because I learned how to make one from my Dad. My Dad is a very successful man, I trust his judgement on how to make a resume, among other things. Yet, I will still go to the meeting for the resume thing for two reasons, one it is required to go, and two who knows I might learn something. That's all really for programming, although next Friday I get to go to the National Wheelchair Games with my civic engagement group, it's a part of programming. Everyone needs to be involved in a civic engagement group. Mine is the Veterans group, so we are volunteering with the wheelchair games because a good number of the participants are veterans. We also have had a few speakers already related to veteran stuff, one was part of the Student Veterans of America, another was a veteran who got a medical discharge and talked to us about his experiences with healthcare and the military. And we are having another woman come talk to us in a few weeks who runs a homeless shelter for female veterans.

Class is not really stressful either, mostly it's just a lot of reading. I am getting a take home midterm this coming week, which should not be too bad, I mean it's just on the reading and our class lectures. So I think that I am prepared, although I do need to finish the book, which is only about 3 more chapters. I should not have a problem finishing those before Tuesday. Other than that class is mostly group work through discussions and such. I actually enjoy the discussions though because this class is filled with people who are involved and want to learn. It is a nice change of pace, because a good percentage of the time I am the only person really excited about class and learning. Ah well it happens. Other than that not too much happened this past week, mostly just wanted to get as much done as I could so I could go out and explore again this weekend. So I am off to do some grocery shopping and then later this afternoon....the White House!

2nd Programming on July 11

This past Monday I had programming yet again, although before programming I got to attend a workshop called True Colors. It was a personality based test, to show you what color (out of four) you were and how you interact with people because of it. The four colors were orange, gold, blue and green. A little blurb about each - orange is an free thinker can do the work but is not stressed about deadlines and likes to be around people - gold is an organized thinker one who plans and lists just about everything and is very concerned with deadlines although does not care much for other people - blue is the very social one who will do the work, but only as long as the group dynamic is okay first - green is the analytical one preferring to work alone and analyze each piece of information as it comes along. After I took the assessment I found out that my two highest scores were gold and orange, only separated by one point. As I told the group this the woman running it was surprised because apparently orange and gold are opposites.

After that I headed to the Career Bootcamp, and got some business cards, so I'm super professional. Although they don't have my cell phone number on them. Strange. Anyways then we had to listen to a woman speak about volunteerism, it was kind of boring. Then we were told to choose from a list two events we would be interested in attending. The first one I went to was called "Negotiating Your First Salary" it was pretty informative and it was cool because the man who headed the discussion up is actually my professor for my leadership class. The second one I went to was called "A Different Bottom Line: Careers in the Non-Profit Sector" which was also informative, and something I found surprising was the best undergraduate degree to have to do work within the non-profit sector.....it was history. Haha, so I've got another option to consider. After that I just headed back with everyone else to the RAF and wrote a couple blog posts before heading to bed.


In not so happy news I also recieved a phone call from my mother saying that our dog Dutchess, had passed away. It was and still is very sad for me. But she was a wonderful dog and I loved her very much.

My Exciting Weekend

This past weekend was rather busy for me. On Saturday a group of us got together and went to the National Zoo. It was an experience. Granted I have been to a few zoos before, but this was the first zoo that had a panda!! And it was so cool because the panda was actually eating when we were there, which is surprising because I believe it's something like 18 hours a day a panda spends sleeping. Other than the panda we did see all the other animals that we could. Although it was such a hot day, like 91 degrees but we kept hydrated and managed to get through the whole zoo by about 2pm (we arrived at like 11:30ish) so luckily we finished before the hottest part of the day. After the zoo everyone came back and napped, then just hung around here for dinner and such. Burke and I walked over to a nearby Five Guys and got some burgers, it was good, although we were planning on another restuarant, but everything in the surrounding area was already closed and it was only like 7pm on a Saturday, which is strange. So Saturday was a long but very good day.


Sunday also was a busy day, because we planned to stop by the National Portrait Gallery because there was an artist there working on a piece for the Girl Scouts of America, since it is there centinial anniversary. Sadly we did not see that, although we did see plenty of girl scouts, some more interested in the gallery than others, hahaha. Anyways, we explored the Portrait Gallery and saw some incredible work. There was even an exhibit called the Art of Video Games (I think Tyler and Tommy would have appreciated it) although they may not know of the earlier video games, pre-Playstation. We explored that whole gallery/museum for a couple of hours. Then the group of us headed back to the RAF and I went to Abi's room to read over her IDP and offer advice to make it better if necessary. I had finished my own IDP Friday evening, so I was doing fine. After that I went back up to Burke's room and hung out there while I wrote a response to Dr. Ponder at Drury, for credit. Then Burke and I went to Fuddruckers for dinner, and luckily snagged a table the place was so busy. Afterwords we walked back from Chinatown to the RAF, figuring we could work off the calories we just ate. Then I came to my room, and headed to bed relatively early because Monday morning I signed up for an event called True Colors, where you learn your leadership style via a personality test.

This Past Week

.....(Dad) so this past week was exciting and I got to do a lot at work. What I did was kind of sporadic, I was researching database options, and helping to manage all the calendars, and setting up tweets in advance, and doing research to create a sole calendar which Elizabeth my supervisor could refer to when planning on what art fairs around the country she wants to attend.

I definitely managed to keep myself busy, especially once she decided on a database she liked. I then got to transfer all the contacts into the new database, and considering I am a perfectionist I had to make sure each contact had as much relevant information as I could find. So in a list of approximately 150 contacts I went through and checked each one individually. I am quite proud of myself for doing it.

I also had my class on Tuesday evening which was really exciting. Learned about some of the early theories surrounding leadership. I get to learn more tomorrow night and I have started reading the book for the class, and I am already absorbed into it. The title is The Leadership Challenge, it's written by a few gentlemen named James Kouzes and Barry Posner. And for those of you who really want to know it's the fourth edition of the book. Apparently that means it is much closer to the length of the first edition, but has the added details of being more worldy, instead of focused on just American leaders.

Other than that the week was pretty tame, just tried to get all the homework, and work done. Although I did get to work from home on Friday because Elizabeth was feeling under the weather and did not want me to get sick. So while I was working I managed to get all my laundry done, which was a nice bonus.

:)

First Real Day of Work

Okay so as everyone knows already I began working at my internship this past Friday, but I did not do much other than some basic paperwork. Yesterday was actually my first day of working. And I can honestly say I was so excited about it! Through the day I did some organizational stuff which included creating a calendar online to list all the openings of new gallery shows, pre-writing tweets to be sent out (the tweets were for Artists of the Day), writing a list to keep track of which artists we used for artist of the day, and then updating the four calendars for the online audience (events, openings, talks, and closings). Today if I have time I will see if I can add more to the events calendar because right now it is kind of bare. After completing those calendars I took my lunch break and chatted with the other intern Maddie. She's really nice, she is from California but attends American University here in DC. After our lunch break we headed back to work, and Elizabeth returned from a lunch meeting so we updated her on all we had accomplished, by this point it was 2:30 and time for Maddie to leave. Since I only had 30 minutes left to work I did some covert research on a new possible competitor. I cannot give out many details, but let's just say that it does seem like this entity will be a competitor, and that I found out much information on the internet. I think this is because I am so good at using the internet to find just about anything people have put online. Even when people are more covert I can find them given enough time. Then I headed home for the day.

Once home, I changed into more comfortable clothes and ran to the grocery store to pick up some bread and bandaids (my feet haven't fully healed yet). Then I came back to the RAF and wrote some blog posts before dinner. I then ate a wonderful dinner of ramen and water before heading down to my class. Class was interesting last night, but mostly lecture based, we learned some of the theories on leadership and did some more activities to see what leadership style we prefer the most. My highest score was in participative, then delegative and then authorative. Although I will admit the scores were all within 5 points of each other. So I would say that I am pretty well rounded when it comes to leadership styles, in the sense that I know when a situation calls for a certain style it is more useful to use that than to just fall back on another. Anyways that is really all that happened last night, now I'm just getting ready to head to my internship at 9:30 to be there by 10:15am, so I will write again when something happens!

First Programming!

Okay so yesterday I had my first ever programming, which I'm still not sure how to adequately define. But yesterday morning was uneventful because I do not work on Mondays so I just slept in and then did some laundry before lunch. After lunch Tina, Abi, AJ, and I left to head to our programming which was meeting at a company called City Year. It's about 45 minutes away from our place with a few Metro stops in between. And we did get a little turned around walking there, but since we were so early it didn't really matter.

We got there and sat down to hear Sam Neely a young woman who works at City Year tell us what it is all about. It actually sounds like a pretty cool program. Basically it has a corps of individuals who then lead, mentor and tutor at risk students in different communities in the United States. The program offers a living stipend which is based on which location you work at. And the program itself runs for the whole school year 10 months. It seems like a really rewarding program, one I might immerse myself in following graduation, who knows?

After her talk about City Year we learned about different leadership styles. She referred to it as the leadership compass. North - Action, South - Empathy, East - Vision, West - Analysis. We then divided up into the four groups and everyone chose which direction they believed best embodied their leadership style. Mine....North. We then discussed the positives and negatives of our group, and what ways other groups could work better with us. After this the groups counted off in numbers from 1-4. Then Sam told us to move to the direction we believed we were the weakest in. I of course moved to the South. We then discussed how we could work to become better leaders in these areas. After this the numbers from earlier grouped together. Each group was then given the task to build a tower. There were restraints though. North people could not touch anything. East people could not see anything. West people could not say anything. And people from the South could to anything. Honestly I hated not being able to touch anything, but it did teach me some things. I noticed that I paid a lot more attention to everyone in the group. Especially the West people because they could not talk so I helped to convey their messages. I also tried to keep the East people involved by telling them what was going on. Our group did not win the tower building exercise because we ran out of time. 30 more seconds and we would have had our last support in, but oh well. I did take away some new ideas about leadership from that. And then we were released to go explore Dupont Circle if we wanted or just to return home to the RAF (which most of us did, to get some food and possibly a nap).

Weekend Adventures

Okay everyone sorry I have been lax on the postings, I have three to give you to. So this is the first, just a general update about my weeked. Friday evening was rather nasty, we even had a tornado warning. It was rather serious, which I found unexpected, considering I did leave Tornado Alley. To avoid worrying my mother and because it was raining I just stayed in and hung out with Abi and a few other friends in her room and chatted.


Saturday, well I was rather tired, so I spent the morning doing some homework for my program, and organizing papers to make sure that I had everything I needed. Mostly it was just writing a reflection on my first week and a half of living in DC and the new opportunities that I can get. Once I completed that I finished Part 1 of my IDP (Individual Development Plan) which is a fancy way of saying what I hope to get from this program and internship. Later in the afternoon I spent time with Burke and played some video games.


As for Sunday, well a group of us got together to explore Chinatown. Abi and Tina had never been out there yet so we figured it would be a good opportunity. We took the Metro out there which is a quick ride, only two stops between ours and Chinatown. Anyways we decided to get lunch at a Chinese restaurant because Abi had never had Chinese food before. We chose a place called Tony Cheng's. Apparently it's rather famous because the restaurant had a wall of photos of rather famous people, although they were all older, the one I recognized was Bill Clinton. After lunch we wandered around a little bit, and then got a quick Rita's again because Abi has never had it, and we figured it would be a good dessert for her since she is lactose intolerant. Following a long day of walking we returned to the RAF and all went to our rooms respectively to get some rest in before Monday and our first programming.

First Day of Internship!

Okay well today was interesting to say the least. First of all I managed to show up to my internship two hours early. Apparently I had forgotten the part of an email she sent me where she said to come at noon and not 10am. Oh well it ended up working out. I did some basic paperwork and she gave me a run down of what I will be hopefully accomplishing this summer. It seems like I will be very busy, and I can honestly stay that I am thrilled. Mostly because I would rather have too many things going on than to have a whole lot of free time. When I have too much free time I do not know what to do with myself.


Specifically as far as my tasks are concerned I will be creating the monthly newsletter, managing all of the multiple calendars that are necessary, making sure the bloggers are prepared and have topics, helping manage all of the paperwork necessary if my supervisor was ever to sell her business, and to help expand upon different aspects of the website along with social media. I really cannot wait to begin everything, it all sounds like things right up my alley.
:)


That's all for now, tomorrow I will be exploring Chinatown in hopes of locating some underground art scenes to report back to my supervisor.