Senior Projects

During these days I continued to work through angular. I was able to spend some time talking to another developer working on a team that does analysis in a way of maps for the government. The application they are working on is called QAC and goes through the maps written by the analysts using government data to figure out detailed information on structures. This application tells the analyst whether or not their information is correct or not. It goes through all the details and figures created and detects, for example, whether a building was reported in a lake. Obviously this isn’t a mistake that would be made but these little details that are errors this application will detect so they can fix it. This application requires going through a lot of data and information in the database to sort it out. They use a PostGres database like the one I was using for my project.

These days I spent working through Angular Javascript. Angular confused me and is still confusing me because the way they set things up in the code base uses multiple different files. A default angular website downloads code that has all the components and modules separated. This makes it so that you require a deeper understanding of the different types of languages required for these individual files. Angular uses typescript which is a language based off of Javascripts confusing language. This for me was actually harder to work with because I have to now learn typscript and how to convert my current javascript to typescript.

Saturday, 4/27:

I arrived at the museum at noon and worked until 5:00. My first job was to be a gallery attendant at Coloring STL, which entails greeting visitors, answering questions, and erasing any writing. There were three families who must have been all related who had like six kids a piece, these kids were going bananas. They were writing tons of stuff on the wall like ”skibidi toilet,” ”sus ohio,” and hate messages geared toward Taylor Swift, drawing dead stick figures, and two girls were taking out all the red and pink markers and leaving them on the floor! So, originally any time they went to another part of the gallery I would erase it, but then they just did it again. So, I channeled my inner tortiose, meaning ”slow and steady wins the race,” a.k.a. let them draw then leave and then finally erase everything. Then there was a teenage boy who reminded me exactly of Sam Leeker. DEAD RINGER. I think he had a crush on me and I just was not in the mood for a suitor, although he was quite funny. For the rest of my shift, I worked as a greeter downstairs, where it was pretty slow.

Sunday, 4/28:

My first job Sunday was to help out at the floral clock craft until noon. After that I will just be greeting people downstairs. I imagine it will be a slower day down here, so my goal is to finish reading ”The Road” and try to write some.

I am also feeling much better mentally than I was at the beginning of the week! I think I have realized that highschool will soon be over and that while it hurts and is frustrating I won’t be dealing with it much longer when I head off for Webster next year. I hope that the people I meet in college genuinely like me for being me and treat myself and others with dignity and compassion. I haven’t had much time to write, but I have been helping my mom prepare the senior picture frames for the sports banquet. I never realized how much work goes into them and she really puts a lot of thought into the gift!

Today Mrs. Kirk had a meeting with two witnesses to prepare them for trial on Monday/Tuesday of next week. I signed a non disclosure agreement simply so that their identities are kept confidential along with their personal information. This post will be a bit confusing and kind of long because I’m not allowed to disclose names, so I apologize if I make zero sense. The case includes a mother and father of 6 kids, 5/6 of the kids, and the grandmother on the fathers side. The case is complicated, but essentially the mother reported that the father had physically abused his mother (the grandmother). He ended up going to jail multiple times over the course of 2 years for breaking probation and continuing to beat his mother as well as the mother of his kids. After forensic interviews were held with the oldest kids at the time (6 and 4 years old), they found out the father also beat his kids (the youngest being twins that were one year old) and threatened to shoot them all on multiple occasions. After all of these things occurred, the children were taken out of their home and the father was in and out of prison while the mother still stayed with him and ended up getting pregnant with another child of his. Mrs. Kirk’s team has now been working a TPR (termination of parental rights) for both parents. However, last week the mother’s lawyer informed Mrs. Kirk that she was going to consent to the TPR. The father also stated that he was planning on consenting but that he couldn’t until the morning of the trial. If he does, the trial will be cancelled and there will be a hearing to determine what happens next.

Still working on taking apart that deck from way back at the beginning of my internship and it’s still super fun! I love getting to just put on some music or an audio book and taking something apart. More meetings but nothing new. I swear they get longer every time…

Today, I showed Mike Steinmann at HITS. HITS is a company that scans paper documents and makes them digital. With the paper that is left, they can do three things. The first is to shred the paper. The second is to send the papers back. The third is to keep the papers and a storage section at HITS. Most people do the first option, and most people don’t choose the third because it is so expensive. HITS mostly works with medical papers but is trying to expand to government papers.

Mike gave me a tour of the place, and then we had a meeting with another person at the company who showed us the new software that the company was going to use to keep track of all of the papers in the warehouse. We both talked for a little about owning your own business, and they told me that the most important thing is to surround yourself with people that you trust.

Mike had to leave early so I shadowed Jo, his number two at the company. She talked to me about different companies that she has owned in the past and a little about what she does from day to day.

This week, I continued to work with my uncle. As I mentioned earlier, some franchises are suing corporations for charging them too much for marketing. So, for some of my time, I had a list of people who saw TCA for a digital ad, and I needed to write down if they hired The Cleaning Authority. The other time this week, I was sitting in Zoom meetings. Most of them were to make sure that the company was still running smoothly. One of the days, I went to two of the three franchises that he owns. I went to the one in St. Charles and Fairview Heights. In the morning at the St. Charles office, he made a speech to the cleaners, telling them how good they were doing. It’s also to show that he cares and knows about his employees. That day, he also showed me the fun side of being self-employed, and we watched horse racing.

Fairview Heights office:

Horse track:

This week was my first week with Robyn Kirk, an attorney at the Juvenile Courthouse Downtown. The attorneys there work on two sides of juvenile care: Child Protection Services and Juvenile Delinquency. Mrs. Kirk works with both sides, as well as cross-over cases, but focuses mostly on CPS. I had about 2 hours there on Monday before I felt like I was coming down with something, which unfortunately led to missing most of the week.

Thursday, 4/25:

On Thursday, I helped with the Covenant Christian School’s production of ”MacBeth.” They are all 4th / 5th graders, so it was interesting to see their and Hannah’s approach to a very dark play, that quite frankly, even disturbs an adult cast. To do this project, Hannah’s big focus was less on the violence and more on the idea that you are faced with countless choices in your life and sometimes we choose the wrong things for the wrong reasons, i.e. Macbeth choosing to murder the king for his own benefit and to satisfy his own and his wife’s hunger for power. The space we were in was much smaller and there was no stage, on top of that there was a pole in the middle of the floor that went to the ceiling, so it was a difficult area to work within. The kids had three performances today, one in the morning, and then two back to back in the evening. They did a really great job of working within the space and bringing their characters to life. I helped with the evening shows. After hanging up props, sweeping and mopping, and setting up chairs, I then handed out programs to guests.

Friday, 4/26:

Tomorrow, I will be coming back to Covenant Christian in the morning, however, there is no performance, I was just helping Hannah clean up the space and pack up the set. There likely won’t be a whole lot to say, so I am just posting tonight. I will help Hannah for about 3-4 hours, then I will have the rest of the afternoon to re-coop, before working opening weekend of World’s Fair. I have heard that this week was quite hectic at the museum. There was also a visit from a celebrity to check out the World’s Fair exhibit this week— John Goodman! I was sad that I missed this celebrity encounter because my dad loves him, but I loved helping Hannah and you can’t win ’em all!

Where do I start? Well, time is flying by fast with my time at Crisis Nursery. Here is my experience Monday through Wednesday. On Monday Morning, I got to the nursery around 9 am; the kids had already had breakfast served by the staff. What’s neat is every week, there comes a new set of kids; most kids only stay three to four days, and the most extended kids stay in a week. So, there was speculation that we would have twin newborns on Monday, which was true. I got there, and there were twins two months old, and then they had an older sibling, so there were three kids there, and then there were three other siblings of kids and then three more siblings. So, a total of eight kids is the most this specific nursery can have. The babies were so cute, but it also shocked me to realize how little they were and that their parents couldn’t take care of them then. The day was the same routine as every day. I was excited to hold newborns and play with new kids, too. I learned a little about what the kids are allowed to play with; for example, they can only watch certain movies that are not inappropriate. Because of bacteria and safety issues, they can’t play in the sprinklers or have a pool. Only the staff is allowed to change them. Come back for part two to hear about the rest of my experience at Crisis Nursery Next week!