Last week I was working at Green Pines Elementary in their Special Education classroom. I spent the week shadowing the paras and learning how to work one on one with kids as well as in a group setting. It was really cool and drastically different to see how classrooms in a small public school work. Although, it was a public school, the classroom I was in reminded me a lot of what one of our classrooms would look like. There were varying grade and skill levels. There was one on one teaching and lessons as well as group lessons. It was just really eye opening to see such a different style of teaching than I am used to.
I got to know a lot of the kids really well, there were nine in total. I also got to teach and work with a lot of them by myself. This was probably my favorite thing I have done over the course of my senior project. I really got to teach and interact with kids with all kinds of different abilities. It was really awesome and made me want to teach more.
Thursday and Friday at Lumeris were very similar to the rest of the week, but Thursday was a lot more laid back as it was the end of a work cycle. The group had finished their project so I spent less time following these people on their projects. I took some group photos of them along with a model sail boat, which seems to be a tradition over there.
At Monsanto, or Beyer, I spent Monday talking to a bunch of different people, including biotech engineers and computer scientists. The next day I went to a different campus, the North Campus, and shadowed some of the computer scientists there. I was given some work there where I was let to fix some of the small errors in their programs.
I finished my first week at the Wildlife Rescue Center. Throughout the week I helped with feeding baby squirrels and cleaning their cages, cleaning out opossum cages and help with transferring the babies to their bigger cages, cleaning water fowl cages, and laundry. One of the things that I found interesting is that the staff hang shredded pieces of newspaper on top of the squirrel cages to help them learn how to make nests, it also helps with enrichment.
Today I started volunteering at the Wildlife Rescue Center. I think I came at a good time because they have a lot of baby animals, they call this baby season. So today I jumped right in and got to feed baby squirrels. They were really cute but there claws were pretty sharp, I also cleaned their cages. I also fed box turtles and cleaned their cages.
This week, I am shadowing Kyle Fulton at Lumeris, which is a medical billing service. Over the past three days, I have been working with Kyle and his co-workers as well as attending various meetings.
On Tuesday, I worked with one of his co-workers who was using python. He was trying to figure out a NoneType error, which means that the code is referring a part of an array or dictionary that doesn’t exist. An array is a list of objects, whereas a dictionary is a list of variables. The other two days I mostly just worked with Kyle and his team.
Today was the beginning of my final week at Cherry Hills. Today was Surgery day which I observed once again. I did, however, get to assist Doctor Leonard a little bit with a dental surgery. I also met a patient who is deaf and Doctor Leonard told me that she understands “good girl” in sign language which I thought was super interesting. This experience has been pretty cool so far and I am learning a lot.
Today most of my time was spent revising a user protocol I wrote earlier last week. The Protocol explains how to use and maintain virtual reality headset bought by the center. It explains how to operate the Oculus from the viewpoint of someone who has never operated the machine. I also attended a seminar focused on genome mapping and how its implemented. Much of the latest presentation went over my head but its been a privilege to observe and learn from professional presentations.
For the second half of my week, I continued what I had been doing previously. I spent more time on the task I was assigned as I had a better understanding of OpenCV and image processing by then.
I had figured out how to separate the grains of rice by getting the computer to draw lines between them, but had run out of time at the end of the week so I was unable to continue my project.
I spent last week working with TREE House, which is a nonprofit organization that provides hippo-therapy to kids and adults. There is a huge range of different people who can benefit from the therapy so I have had a lot of exposure to that. I have worked one on one with people with varying disabilities, mental health, paralysis, veterans, and people who just want to take riding lessons. It is really eye-opening to a completely alternative source of physical and emotional therapy for people. I don’t get to do a lot of hands-on work, but I get to learn a lot by watching lessons and sessions.
I am also working closely with the Volunteer Coordinator to help her make the volunteer schedules as well as communicate and coordinate directly with the volunteers. It is cool to see the behind the scenes of a nonprofit organization as big as TREE House.
Today was the last day of week one at Cherry Hills. Today was a shorter day but we still had appointments. I got to meet two adorable puppies today. One of them was a Golden doodle and Australian Shepard mix, which I didn’t know existed but he was super cute.
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