Blog 1 My Workplace

My workplace is a Waste Management Office in Oakland, California. Waste Management is a large corporation with many employees that is responsible for handling the waste output of households and companies. My workplace is very large, with two main building that are connected and a huge parking lot where the Waste Management trucks are parked. These two building hold hundreds of employees and employ all sorts of people. Most of the drivers and dispatch personnel have high school diplomas while the managers are all college graduates. My workplace serves most of the home and business owners  in the Bay Area. Waste Management is very efficient and has a very complex but effective setup. All its departments collaborate and help each other to ensure customer satisfaction and conservation of the environment. I cannot discern any weakness in the Waste Management workplace, all the employees work hard to serve the customers and seem to have expertise in their respective fields. 

Blog 2 My Mentor

My mentor's name is Mark Cramer and he is a dispatch manager at Waste Management. Marks day consists of arriving at work at 4 in the morning and preparing for the day making sure that the dispatch unit performs at their best and has the tools they need to serve the customers. He helps the workers troubleshoot problems in the MAS program that they use to log information. He is  also editing a program that will make the trucks dispatch a lot more efficient and organized in order to save the company money making him a very valuable asset. He first worked in operations at boarders before came to WM. He also went to UC Davis where he got his bachelors in Sociology even though he initially was interested in computer science

Blog 3 My Role

My main responsibility is to program scripts as instructed by my mentor. He usually assigns me scripts that make the dispatch unit's job much faster and reduce human error. I don't have an exact title but my co-workers call me the programming intern. Along with programming, I also am assigned articles related to Waste Management and Programming. Reading these articles gives me perspective on how big Waste Management is and why Mark is so important to the company. A regular day for me consists of either a meeting or a phone call with my mentor followed by hours of collaborating with my co-worker Alex to complete the assignments Mark gives us. We usually email the work we complete to Mark as we soon as we finish in order to get feedback and incorporate it. Sometimes we conference with Mark near the end of the day to review the work we completed during the day and rate our success. 

Blog 4 Project Brainstorm

My project was already planned by my mentor before I started my internship. Unfortunately Mark hasn't explained our project to us yet in order to avoid us getting distracted and first learning the tools we will need to complete the project. Mark also does not want us to explicitly talk to others about what we do to avoid making potential false promises about making their jobs easier. Going off of the skills we are learning, our project will probably create a script in which the user will get to enter specific information like a route number and have the action they are trying to do (like printing squentials) happen automatically. 

Blog 5 Progress on my WLE Project

Today at my WLE, Alex and I went over the scripts and articles we were assigned last week. My mentor emailed us some information regarding our project, after consulting with rolloff supervisor Mike Magistro he has discovered a more efficient way to make the dispatch's work easier. He said that he will cater our training next week to include the programming strategy this new method may require (he was not very explicit about the change or the strategy required). For our project so far we have mastered key skills that we will need to program like the if/then statement, loop, string trim, if/else statement and learning how to signature variables (mine are Dhvani and Saida). 

My adviser has not discussed the project with my mentor and I in detail as of yet. 

Blog 6 Leadership Skills

The leadership skill I utilize the most is Critical Thinking. I have to analyze the task I am assigned and draw  among the skills I have been taught and choose the one that will be most effective. I think I am using this skill really well because I have completed all my assignments so far with relative ease. I could further improve my performance by taking more notes and referring to them more. This leadership also allows me to have deep conversations with my mentor and fellow intern Alex to solve any issues that we may face (if the MAS application is down). My mentor uses Productive Collaboration the most, he has to work with the dispatch team and troubleshoot issues and make sure his team has all the necessary tools to perform. He has a lot of meetings where he creates plans with his boss to move the company forward  

Blog 7 Reflection

From this internship, I have learned that programming comes really easy to me and that I immensely enjoy programming. I have learned that working with people is key to achieving success and that being innovative in  the workplace will get one recognition. My mentor has been promoted and recognized because he has used his expertise to bring different skills to Waste Management  that others have not. My WLE has helped me learn that personal relationships and feelings cannot be considered in business, smart business may force one to make tough decisions. My key contribution to WLE is my project, which has changed the data entry aspect of the Rolloff department. My project involves getting dispatch to enter data real time as drivers talk to them over radio using a script I wrote for them, eliminating the delayed data entry which others do once the drivers return. My WLE project may force some people to leave their jobs but will ultimately benefit Waste Management by decreasing cost and allowing for smart business. 

Blog 8 Professionalism 

In order to find my WLE I communicated with my Academic Seminar teacher before the program started about possible internships. My teacher, Mr Cheng told me he had set up a programming internship, something which sounded really interesting. The most effective way to look for an internship is to ask your teachers about any connections they have in fields you're interested in. I think being a responsible adult in the workplace means carrying out your responsibilities and supporting your co workers to make sure everyone is able to successfully complete their work.  

Blog 9 Life at my WLE

Today we continued to work on our project and began to incorporate pads and scripts within each other. Each piece of information that a data entry person was responsible for must now automatically be saved in an excel file and then transferred back into MAS once all the information is available. This project will really change the way Rolloff dispatch works because it will make them responsible for a lot more and will eliminate the data entry position. I have improved as an intern because I have started asking for support from other employees when my mentor is not available and have also worked with Alex to trouble shoot on our own. My workplace is a great place to work because of all the friendly supportive co-workers there. People don't seem too stressed and are always willing to help one another making new workers feel very comfortable, something which allowed me to not be nervous and focus on my work even if my mentor was not around. 

Blog 10 The End

I have had an amazing time at my WLE. I have learned a tremendous in these 10 weeks from my mentor and the other workers at Waste Management. I am really grateful to have gotten opportunity to not only learn programming but learn about discipline, business and being a successful worker. My mentor has given advice and wisdom that help me stay focused and be successful in my future endeavors. This experience has left me wanting to learn more kinds of programming and use what I have learned here as a foundation. I will also take programming classes in  college and look for other internship or employment opportunities where I get to learn new skills and apply the skill I have learned. I also hope to go back and work with Mark again one day and really appreciate everything he has done to teach me and guide me.