Over the past week, things have started to piece together. I started to work on uploading my work onto my digital portfolio. While doing this, I decided to start planning my Winter Showcase invitations. The main thing I ended up doing this past week was adjusting colors to match my color scheme and browsing templates to find a few I like so I can go from there. Towards the second half of the week, I researched semiconductors to decide whether or not I should really change my topic specificity to semiconductors from biochemical engineering.
With much thought, I realized it is time for me to catch up on uploading my work thus far on this journey on to my digital portfolio. I came to the conclusion that it will take me a while to adjust it to what I want it to end up looking like. In the meantime, our research presentation days are approaching. During this presentations, we talk about our research assessments and interviews and what we have learned from them so far. So, I started going through all the thing I have researched on this journey and started jotting down key things to mention and going over my interview assessment pushed me to do a research assessment over semiconductors. With the new information I gathered on semiconductors, I was quite pleased with my decision to go through and research this topic because it fascinates me. The challenges and new advancements that go along with semiconductor showed me how this topic is still innovation to help the world step into the future. Overall with this research and all the things I have done so far, I have seen improvement within myself and believe this will help me decide on my original work that is coming up.
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Over the course of this previous week, I feel like I have made the biggest jump so far with my first interview in my journey. My first interview was Mr. Nilesh Doke who is an Engineering Manager at Texas Instruments. I am extremely grateful for the time he had set aside for me in his very busy schedule and I learned so much from the 30 minutes that we had.
During my interview, I got a brief but detailed overview on Semiconductors. I never really understand how semiconductors worked before and I only knew Texas Instruments made calculators. I was very surprised when I found out that the Texas Instruments calculators are only a small part of the things TI makes. Semiconductors very interesting to me and I am on the verge of changing my subject within chemical engineering from biochemical engineering to semiconductors. After this interview, I have become so interested in semiconductors that I decided to do my upcoming Research Assessment on this topic. As Mr. Doke spoke, I observed how passionate he was about his career. Usually, I know when people like their job or a certain subject but this time it was really obvious and it inspires me to one day be that passionate about my job. Overall this week, I have seen improvement within myself and feel more confident for upcoming tasks because of how much I learned through my interview and am a lot more excited to see what else is in store for me in upcoming interviews and my journey as a whole. In the last few days, I have been looking for more contacts and researching about biochemical engineering. We had a topic proposal due this week and I was unsure what I specifically want to target my chemical engineering journey with ISM. With this question in mind, for my Research Assessment 7, I decided to research biochemical engineering. Throughout my other research assessments, I noticed that chemical engineers and biochemical engineers typically work together and as I looked into it more, I discovered biochemical engineering is a branch of chemical engineering but a bit more advanced. I found it really interesting and decided to target this journey with ISM towards biochemical engineering.
Since I selected specifically to study biochemical engineering in the field of chemical engineering, I focused my research assessment on the outlook of a biochemical engineer. It helped me get a better grasp on what a biochemical engineer is and also a chemical engineer. I realized how in-depth and more complicated biochemical engineering as well as crucial to our society. The innovations they create help out advance our world to live better. While figuring out my topic with the help of my assessment, I started to find more contacts to contact so I can ask to interview them. I realized I could ask Mr. Doke when I interview him on October 19th for any contacts to build my networking as well. Because I have many things to ask Mr. Doke, I made myself a list to make sure I do not forget anything. This week overall has not been as eventful as last week but I feel like I have progressed further in the journey with my researching and topic selection. The past week has been one of the most eventful ones. We started off preparing for the Business Symposium. While remembering our professional handshakes and having our resumes ready, we went to Independence High School to practice professional conversations, improve interview skills, and learn the importance of networking. This experience was exciting as well as insightful. Along with the Business Symposium, I worked on my SMART Goals and started to make a list of professionals who asked I email them during my cold calls.
My most favorite part this past week was the interviewing process at the Business Symposium. I got the opportunity to interview with 3 professionals from different areas. During the interviews, I met and got to know more about the Deputy Chief of Police of the Operations Bureau, an IT manager, and a CEO of a newly created business called Takeout 2.0. They all had different backgrounds and they gave me contacts to help me start my networking. I was able to learn from their opinions and got feedback on how to improve my resume. I was really appreciative of the interviewers who took their time off to help us experience how it is like being in the professional world. The SMART Goals I worked on this week were essentially my short-term, midterm, and long-term goals. In order to come up with some goals that I truly wanted to achieve that related with ISM was a bit difficult. I managed to make one of my personal goals tie in with my ISM journey which was eye-opening because I did not realize at first how I could connect my goals together. For example, one of my goals is to finish all my college applications and turn them in at least one month before they are due. At first glance, I did not see how this goal is related to ISM but when I started deciding how to achieve this goal, the steps I decided to take could also apply to ISM so I can keep up with all my work. From this, I learned that everything has a connection even though it may seem like there isn’t so always look for one. There is a saying that it’s not called life if you aren’t trying new things. So I guess that means life happened this past week. We started making cold calls. Something I have never done before. In addition, my main focus for this past week was to finalize my resume and research metabolic engineering for my Research Assessment 5.
After multiple people looked over my resume, I made all the final changed and adjusted it so it would be ready for Business Symposium. I adjusted the color scheme to make it go with my portfolio. After making that change, I went and started adjusting my website to match. Piecing my banner and logo together with my website, it started to come together pretty well. There are some refining to do but I am actually surprised on how well it is coming together because I am not that great with technology. After submitting my final draft, I started making cold calls. I have made a couple of calls but not been successful thus far. I think this will take me awhile to get used to but I believe if I keep trying, I can do it. The main focus of my week that pushed me the furthest this week regarding my chemical engineering journey was my research assessment. I decided to research Metabolic Engineering this week because I was intrigued by the introduction of the article I came upon. I was curious how this topic played a role in chemical engineering so I decided to research it for my assessment. In the end, I ended up gaining valuable information which will allow me to better understand my topic in the future. |