Hudson's December Week 2 Reflection
Describe a challenge you have faced in a project thus far. How did you overcome it?
Throughout this week, I was stuck for a while on what information I needed to collect when I was listing down the details of event venues that U+ Education & YRES could potentially use in the future. Rental booking procedures, dimensions of the event venue & people capacities were all important details I needed to collect but didn’t know how to at first. To overcome this confusion, I had to persist through a process of trial and error of testing out many keywords/phrases to search in the Google search bar. For instance, when trying to find all the details for renting space at COLLABÜRO (a coworking space in Ottawa), I’d also add the words “rental technical specifications” or “booking information” to see if I can get immediate details to list on a spreadsheet. All of this considered, a big part of overcoming this challenge came from learning the best inputs for searching event venue information.
At U+, we advocate for lifelong learning and professional development through experiences. Describe a time where you were pushed out of your comfort zone during your placement and what you have learned from the experience.
Being tasked to make cold calls towards storage unit representatives was a previous instance where I was pushed out of my comfort zone, but a more recent experience was when I needed to learn how to improvise responses to questions from the person that I was calling. I was accustomed to reading off my notes & a given script when making cold calls, but wasn’t too confident at first when answering questions on the spot. I wanted to improve in that area, which pushed me to ask my project supervisor Sarah Yeung some questions on how to respond to certain types of questions. Taking my time to apply her advice when I later made calls made me more confident in my responses when I knew more about what I was talking about, which made me learn that asking for advice can be very helpful to push myself out of my comfort zone.
What application or website do you use the most on a regular basis during your shift (e.g., Slack, Google search engine, monday.com)? What do you use it for?
A huge chunk of my tasks involve me using monday.com and the Google search engine, since my responsibilities have mainly oriented around data entry. I’ve used the Google search engine to discover new event venues, contact information of mayors & city counsellors within cities across Canada, and details of school boards & facilities in both the private and public sectors. And with that information, I’d use monday.com to input all of that information into separate boards & tables, while also using the commenting feature to add clarification on some points of information (e.g. making a comment to note that a school I listed on the spreadsheet does not have an email address). Continuously, I’d use monday.com to track my progress, giving me multiple percentages on how much a specific table/board is completed with all information.
If you had to choose an animal (real or fictional) to describe your working style, what would it be and why?
I’d choose a cat to describe my working style because it reflects my habit of always moving around in different places of my home-space to work. Sometimes I find myself cozy working in my bed, or one day I’ll feel more encouraged to work behind my screen at a public library. I believe a cat reflects this behaviour since they tend to have a small array of locations they stay at a lot throughout the day within a house, taking advantage of certain spots to feel more comfortable. This is much like how I switch locations to feel more energized and productive during my shift.
