Senior Projects

Well, this is new. To be honest, I still dont know a bunch on how this stuff works as of time of writing. However, I am much closer to understanding now. Throuought the first week, my goal was to learn the basics of the engines I could work in between Unity and Clickteam Fusion 2.5. I was then to make a choise between the two on which one I was to use. In the end, I chose Clickteam, as that seems to require less coding. For the game I wish to achieve, I needed extensions to utilize the open source Sonic Worlds Engine. However, that is a tale for another week. As for this first week, I spend the first half doing the Clickteam Fusion built in tutorials, then spent the second half doing the Unity built in tutorials.

Today I am in Alton, IL. I was tasked with getting everybody’s computer and changing all the storage to one drive from iCloud. It is fairly simple, however, there are at least 30 computers to do. overall a pretty chill day.

On Saturday I had my second show at The Sheldon. It was a Dean Martin tribute. A tribute is when someone sings songs all from one particular artist or band usually from and different time period. It was a rental, meaning no one was booked for the show. Someone rented the venue out. That night I ordered and got dinner for some of the staff and I. As well as scanning tickets and ushering. Overall it was a successful first week!

For Friday I got into the office and discussed a little bit more what I learned the day before with Robyn. She explained to me in more depth about the cases we observed in court the day before. I forgot to mention on Thursday she was given five more cases to work on, three of them were child protections cases and the other two were TPR’s. She worked on a few of those cases while I observed and asked questions about her process. She then took me down to intake, which is where the cases first come in and get vetted to decide if they are worth pursuing (meaning if they have enough evidence) or not. I got to talk to the one of the workers who decides if the case is worth pursuing. She shared with me her own process and showed me how there are so many steps before the cases ever gets to the attorneys. When a case comes in and the officer has not given enough detail or evidence she will speak with him and ask them to go more in depth in order for this case to be pursued. I learned a lot from her and Robyn as we all talked and they explained different case scenarios and answered any and all my questions. For next week I am looking forward to learning more about how to use evidence to strengthen cases.

On Friday I got to work from home. Since I didn’t have to commute, I was able to sleep in. I started work at 8:30 and finished around 2. I was working on creating a newsletter for the company. Since Covid, they stopped the newsletter and asked me to build on that contained health news, recipes, fitness, and social news like where to go for the weekend and such.

For the first three weeks of my senior projects I am working with Robyn Kirk who is a juvenile attorney at St. Louis City Family Court. I started my senior projects on Thursday because Robyn switched from working with the Children’s Division to the Juvenile Office. She gave me four different books to look into before my first day. I finished one of the books called “Hey, Kiddo” by Jarrett J. Krosoczka about a child who’s mother was a heroin addict. He talked about his struggles and the importance of healing and sharing them. I am now reading “Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew” by Sherrie Eldridge.
For the first half of the day on Thursday I got the opportunity to sit in on delinquency and child protection cases in court and meet some of Robyn’s co-workers. There was so much information being said during court and it was really eye opening and fascinating to see the wide ranges of different cases. For the second half of the day Robyn took me through her process of looking at one of her TPR (terminate parental rights) cases. From Thursday I think the most important thing I have learned so far is that in child protection cases they aren’t necessarily trying to take the child away from their parents, but instead are trying to come up with a reunification plan to reunite the family. If the reunification plan fails they then will look into terminating the parents rights. I am looking forward to the next two weeks with Robyn and learning more about the legal side of child protection.

For the first week of our project, I spent every day in the office of CSI Commercial Services Inc. at their St. Louis location. This is the head branch for the entirety of the company and therefore handles the majority of the finances and organization. I spent the first two days working with president, Brad Earnhardt and learned the bird’s eye view of the entire operation. The following days I spend with three other faculty members including vice president, Shelly. During these visits, specifics filled in the initial information Brad had given me to help give me a better understanding on how all the departments were connected. I am excited to visit two more of their locations in May to compare management and communication.

For Thursday and Friday I have been putting cushions on pool furniture, replacing the faucets in the bathrooms, checking in on resident’s shower head, going through trash and recycle on some of the main floors, watched over the light guy as he checked chandeliers, and I have cleaned an outdoor sculpture outside the main lobby. Overall I would say that it has been a good first week.

I have been shadowing Lou Filla while he has been doing IT work and I traveled to 3 different schools. The Fulton School, Rohan Woods, and St Francis Borgia Grade School. During this time I have been working and learning about general technology problems such as WIFI, wiring, and security. When I went to the Fulton School our job was to set up the chrome books for ERB testing. So we went to the lunch room closet and took out all of the old Chromebooks and chargers and brought them upstairs to the meeting room. After that I worked with Lou Filla’s son Noah Filla and we had to brainwash all of the laptops and login with the ERB account to add the ERB program onto the Chromebooks. To make sure everything was working properly we had to update the Mac IOS to the most recent date and that probably took the longest amount of time. After everything was completed and up to date me and Noah put all of the computers onto a cart with chargers so they are ready for the ERBS next week and the week after.

The next day I went to Rohan Woods and that day was a little bit more laid back. Part of IT work can also be managing wires and cables for people to make things easier and more convenient. Lou was checking the internet to see if everything was connected and working properly. While he was doing that I was organizing the electronics in cabinets, under desks, and behind shelves. Basically organizing keyboards, USB’s, and overall just making it easier to find everything when they need it. I working with Noah while doing all of this and we ended up making everything “perfect” or at least that is what they told us. Zip Ties were probably the most helpful that day because it just held all of the wires together making it easier to see what we were doing.

The following day I went to St Francis Borgia Grade School. This was probably my favorite day this week because it was a really old style school building. Under some of the buildings there was structures built and unfinished from the 50’s or the 60’s that still had walls of stone and it was really cool to see all of that. But that wasn’t the point of going there what the goal at St Francis Borgia was. The goal was to check all of Lou’s wire closets he had set up to see if they were all working properly and organizing it to make it look nicer. Ultimately we were trying to free up more space for when they were ready to add more electronics to the school. I did not get hands on with this stuff but I still got the chance to learn what everything was and how all of it worked.

My favorite part about this week was being able to travel to all of these places. I got to see things I had not seen before while driving around on roads I have never drove on. Knowing about the places I went to makes me want to go back and check it out in the future on my own time, just to explore and see more of these cool places.