Unfortunately we could not interview our staff on time, they were all busy the last few days we were there.
I am very honest when I need help. I certainly in the beginning of externship asked for a lot of help from the peers because I myself did not know how to help the children with coding. I still ask for a lot of help from my peers everyday because I am still learning the gist of coding and teaching students about it. I still ask for help and never feel embarrassed nor shy about it. I see it this way, I can either be too embarrassed to ask for help and not do it and still not know what to do or I could ask for help and not embarrassed that I didn't know. I am all for promoting to help others and not t be afraid to ask others for help as well. I am very happy that I am interning at thinkabit. I had been to thinkabit twice in the fall but did not get the full experience as a teachers helper, however I gained more experience now. Thinkabit is a great place full of many opportunities and I knowledge. I am learning a lot more than I thought I would be and am very hands on with the work. Since the kids build projects for the second half of the day I feel very privileged to be there and to help guide them to work with others. It's very different from being a student to a teachers assistant. I'm getting a whole new perspective and gaining a lot of respect for teachers, especially when they know how to deal with the hard kids. I am realizing how important it is to listen so the teachers don't repeat themselves and how important it is to be genuinely respectful and kind because impressions can last a life time. Some of these kids I will remember for a long time whether they were well behaved or not so well behaved. We are given many small projects to do, whether it takes our whole day or is part of our day. We have many projects we complete for them. They range from putting data in and making the data cleaner to help finish the kits or making more career or IOT cards. For example today we had to get rid of the old career cards that the kids get to take home with them and replace them with the new ones. We organized everything by alphabetical order and stored the rest of them away in alphabetical bins. And on Thursday was a whole day full of projects. One of the interns cleaned up the data on excel sheets with the career choices and created wordals, while the other worked on analyzing the IOT data. I worked on ringing career cards all day, which was a much more challenging job than I thought it was going to be. And the fourth intern counted all the kits, the ones with missing pieces and how many we had. We all took part and split the work evenly and completed the task before the day ended. Working at Qualcomm thinkabit I have noticed that one of their goals is to really educate the children about engineering and for the students to leave with a good spirit and make them feel like they can do anything in the world and everyone has a fair chance to become something. One iof th ereally valuable lessons they learn from coming to thinkabit is learning how to work with others, even if they are used to it, they work with new peers to create something cool and presentable. One of the funniest things that happened was one of our other intern, was counting the bean bags so we could know how many supplies we needed for each and as he was counting he lost track at 4. It was quite silly because we get young kids who can barely count but can actually get past 4. Another time was when one of the kids just drew a squiggly line across the board for their career choices, there are a lot more but this blog post would be really long then. I thought I had the patience for children but this externship has really pushed my patience with children. I thought that I had developed this skill because I really do enjoying working with children but having those few that push your buttons everyday gets very tiring and its new kids everyday so you never know which ones your're getting. I'm learning how to work with more challenging kids and taking my time and not getting frustrated with them. One of the benefits of working at Thinkabit is working with my hard working peers. We all get a long very well and jump at any moment to help one another. One thing that strikes me about working at Thinkabit is how fast the relationship grows between the teachers and the students. In the beginning the the students are very shy and afraid to share their ideas but Jen is very friendly and helps them to get more comfortable with the class and sharing, so the bond is made very quickly. One of the things that surprised me about my job is how much patience I don't have. As most people know children can be very difficult and sometimes don't always cooperate with what is asked of them, so I am little worried that I won't have enough patience. However I am hoping to gain more patience and learn from this. I'm very excited to continue to work here however and learn more about engineering careers because I have never put interests nor any effort into it, but I'm excited to expand my options and really learn from this externship.
For the next few weeks I and other peers from my school will working together at Thinkabit. A program that is at qualcomn for young students to come learn about engineering and qualcomn. At Thinkabit we will be assisting the teachers with the students and putting data work in. Our mentor, Jen is one of the main teachers who educates the children about what qualcomn and what jobs it offers, she also helps them to identify different career choices and does different activities with them.
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