Senior Projects

Sunday evening, I drove out to Urbana/Champaign Illinois with my mom for a college visit to the University of Illinois. For a while, Mizzou has been my top choice because I have friends there, and it’s close to home. I’ve been told repeatedly that U of I has great programs and is really high on the list of top colleges in the nation. On one website, UIUC is ranked around 25th in the nation! Despite UIUC having great programs, my anxiety had been pushing me to just go with the easy option: Mizzou, but I felt obligated to visit UIUC as a formality. Over time, I started feeling more and more interested in the school. They have 1000+ student organizations and clubs, and many other impressive stats. 95% of Alumni that provided post-graduation information were either employed or in higher education within six months of graduation, and the average starting salary for graduates of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is nearly $75,000. After my tour, I did a lot more research into the clubs and organizations that the school has to offer, and found nearly a dozen clubs that I would be excited to join.

I haven’t visited Mizzou yet, so I think I will have to schedule a tour for sometime next week so that I can make my decision before May 1.

This week at Continuum, I told Kayla, one of the directors, that I was interested in some of the administrative work that happens at Continuum. After overhearing and seeing some of the stressful situations with insurance, I’m interested in some of the rules and regulations that the staff have to follow. There is an endless pile of paperwork to be done. Today, I spent the morning and most of the afternoon cutting, coloring, and laminating things for learning activities for the kids. It seems like tedious work, but I enjoyed focusing and running through the process of each project.

In the afternoon, I spent more time observing, and I watched as one therapist worked with a child on exposure therapy to basic hygiene tools like a toothbrush, nail clippers, and a hairbrush. These seem like things that are really easy and painless to use, but sometimes they can cause an unpleasant or uncomfortable sensation to kids with autism and sensory sensitivity.

On Monday Robyn took me to a Family Law class at SLU. I got see a glimpse of what law school could look like for me in the future if I ended up pursuing it. The professor went over many of the topics Robyn had been teaching me about, so I felt very accomplished that I could keep up with the class. On Tuesday I got the opportunity to observe court online through Webex. Webex is the courts version of zoom, and the reason they use Webex is because it is more secure. On Wednesday I have gotten to sit in on court hearings and I observed my first motion hearing. I also got to speak with the judge about the misconceptions he has seen in the juvenile system, it was a very interesting conversation and I learned a lot. I only have two more days working with Robyn and observing the juvenile system, and I am realizing that my time here has gone by quickly.

I started off this week with barn chores such as cleaning out stalls, feeding the horses and letting them out. Once they were out to pasture, I helped two sweet old ladies clean up a butterfly garden by racking all of the dead leaves off of the beds. The weather was gorgeous and I enjoyed their company as they teased each other back and forth and inspired me with their life stories and faith through their trials. It was a very peaceful way to start the week.

I will go back to helping with programs and horsemanship throughout the rest of the week and hope to continue riding and working on my own ground work as well.

Monday night, I was able to take my family and Joy out to the ranch to watch a performance done by all of the girl wranglers with a special senior performance with letters and speeches. It is set up is parallel to how we conduct our senior nights. The performance was created to give a visual demonstration of the scripture that the girls had been studying throughout the year as they volunteered. The best way I can describe the type of riding is like a dance team. Each horse and rider had their own pattern in the arena that all came together to make a production. It was very heartwarming and reflected a deeper aspect to the ranch.

Good morning everyone. Today is a very slow day for me. I woke up at 5 am with a killer headache, nonetheless, I pushed through and went to the gym. At around 7am I headed to work . There was a lot of traffic. I got into the O’Fallon office at 8:45 am. I opened my laptop and went straight to Outlook(Microsoft’s email). I had no new emails so I started to create a newsletter and make it more like a bulletin board post. I scheduled them to send to every employee once a month with a partner of the month, highlighted recipes that are healthy, fitness updates, local activities to do, and more. I then cleaned the storage room and took inventory of what we have(did not have time to finish it today). At around 2:30pm I headed to school for track practice.

I got the Sonic Worlds Engine to finally work! It was a really simple solution too. It turns out, I had just put the files in the wrong folder. Anyway, I will now learn the engine through the Lake Fepard Hedge Land playlist.

I have spent more time shadowing and doing actual work in these last few days than I have throughout all of last week, so things are looking promising. Learning that my dad has a lot of things to do and a lot of his time is spent running as well as scouring through emails, sorting them into junk emails and one’s that are important to him. I’ve also learned that a lot of my dad’s income is made through investments as well as managing errands and other businesses. My dad’s partner has taken on some of the responsibility within the company that my dad would usually take on due to the situation involving Nathan’s cancer. My hope is that things will return to how they usually are and I can see a little bit more of the inner workings of how STR is managed.

The rest of my week was much more productive than the beginning part of my week. I was able to get some significant shadowing work done over the last few days whether it be over zoom or real life shadowing whenever possible. I have learned a lot by shadowing my dad in the last couple of days because I am starting to learn the thinking process of my dad. My dad has made a point to teach me the value of networking, and why it’s such a key element of business. He emphasized the point of “doing things for others without expecting anything in return.” He believes that this creates future opportunities because the strong connections themselves are what build rapport.

The first couple of days in the first week of my senior project went by very slowly with little work to do. This is because of my brother Nathan’s recent t-cell aggressive cancer diagnosis. I was going to shadow my dad, but my dad has been in the hospital constantly because of my brother so we’ve gotten very few opportunities to get senior project work done. Sometimes life doesn’t always go as planned so I did my best to stay patient and communicate with my dad so we could do senior project work at a short notice.

For the second half of week one, I spent my days shadowing the behavioral therapists at Continuum as they went about their day working with the kids there. For the most part, I observed and didn’t interact in the activities. I didn’t want to interrupt or be a distraction to the class. Towards the end of the week, however, I started talking more to the RBTs and getting to know them a bit better. I’d say I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable around the staff and students. The two boys that I babysat on Monday talked to me a lot and seem to have taken a liking to me. On Friday, I asked if I could learn a little bit more about the treatment plans of some of the kids. It’s been very interesting to learn about the goals for each kid and the plan for completing those goals. Next week, I think I will be helping to prepare materials for some activities and projects. I hope that I will be able to learn a little bit more about the administrative side of things. I want to know a little bit more about what goes on behind the scenes as far as communicating with parents and insurance.

On Friday, I went into our Swansea office to fix someones computer. While I was there, I had my shoulder pain checked out and I got some stuff done to it. My shoulder doesn’t hurt anymore but it was painful at the time of getting the procedure done. I got dry needling done to my shoulder. It is like acupuncture but with a bigger needle. Over all an easy experience.