CCEC Career Fair

This college career Fair was held December 06, 2016 in the CCE center also known as the library at information technology high school open specially for CTE academy students who are interested to be exact on pursuing a technology career related to their class. I enjoyed this opportunity because I got to ask a lot of questions about my choices and had no doubt that these people were the best to answer them. So many representatives came that there was barely space which was a good thing. They were very specific about the programs the different colleges offered and different departments. One thing I liked as well is how interested and pursuing they looked when talking to us. Also a girl that had graduated a couple of months ago when now being part of the US navy which inspired us to believe that anything is possible. She made us think positively and gave us a boost of confidence. A lady that talked to me told me that it is okay to not know right now what I want to do in college as long as I don't stop discovering because that is how I would find out.

Armory Career Fair

The morning of April 07 of 2016 the Web Design academy and the Apple academy went to a career fair at the Armory.The overall purpose of this trip was so we could talk to many huge and famous companies such as Facebook or Yahoo which I found very exciting because it was time for us to discover more opportunities and to know more of what the real world is about. Some really good lunch was given to us at the right time because the place was really big and had a lot of people so that  boosted our energy up. I was given the opportunity to talk to many different college representatives that told me about their variety of programs and that gave me more chances for me to consider a couple of technology careers. I really wished there were more people organizing this events more often for later graduating students so that way the amount of people that get into college prepare is greater and then we would have more people involved into technology.

Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG)

Tomorrow June 2nd, 2017 the web client programming class is going to the Gerson Lehrman Group Incorporation at 60 East and 42nd Street third floor to be specific. I personally am looking forward to this trip because I have lately been having a lot of problems trying to figure out what it is that I want to pursuit as a career. I am debating between what is graphic design and accounting which in my opinion are two complete different things and so this trip will answer my questions to what the business fields are really into. I overall also want to learn what the GLG really is, what they do and how they do it because according to their website they are a major corporation that have helped a lot throughout the world and not only that but offers a variety of jobs as well. I would definitely learn a lot from others stories and how they have outcome various obstacles and also be reminded that it is okay to not focus on a single career but even better to go ahead and discover.

After the trip I definitely learned a lot of things within that the most important things about what takes for someone to eventually be successful during an interview which is specially being curious. I learned that before you even go and ask for an application you should obviously still do your research and find out what the environment is like, how to whole company started, and specially what is it made of like what they do, how they do it and why. It is important that you have a little bit of previous knowledge to impress the person interviewing you but if you don't it is not a good thing as long as you ask all the questions you have during the interview. I learned a lot of some workers and know that they not only did not know about GLG but also that there is no way they regret having that opportunity. The environment at GLG is obviously friendly. The structure just gives it a lot more of a comfortable feeling and while we were on the tour we just felt welcomed. What is liked the most was the fact that everyone gets their own space when they want to be alone or get to share the area with someone else in case they want to have company. I would definitely love to work on such an open space because just like the CEO mentioned he created the place by thinking about how all of his workers would feel and i think it is obvious because he said that he does not believe in personalization at all and well that is why so many people find this place interesting and appealing. I definitely learned that giving up is not an option, that no question is dumb and that no matter coffee is always a good choice.

WBL Workshop #4

I think that out of all the workshops we have completed this is the most interesting one because we get to learn more about ourselves. From this workshop I discovered things that I did not even know about my personality and it made it easier for me to discover what career I want to pursuit. After I finished the variety of little tests given to us, some of them showed that i am more of a hands on person rather than working while I am sitting or something like that. I have always been that kind of person that lacks communication skills and so it has always been hard for me to talk to people. These tests said exactly that, that I am reserved, quite and shy. In terms of how it helped me choose a career I am not debating between maximum 2-3 careers when at some point I had absolutely no idea of what I wanted to be or what interested me. By a hands on type of person I mean one that needs to constantly be doing something. I also reassured  myself in that I wanted to work with numbers. I know that working with children or as a secretary is not my thing cause I could get easily bored and that I am a lover of nature. I have always known this facts because no matter how much I love kids, I will never find enough patience for them. Also because I have taken care of plants since I was a child so I of course love them. Lastly I know that I am a very organized person overall.

WBL Workshop #3

The interview skills workshop in my opinion has been the most important and useful one we've had through the course of these years. Specially because we did this during our last semester of high school which just gives us a better reason to prepare for the future which is no far but now a few weeks away from us entering the real world so we want to make sure that we are as prepare as we could be. The workshop was conducted by Ms. Lopez who brought in a special guest Mr. Michael Chao. Mr. Chao is a master of business administration graduate and he came in to basically give us tips for certain interview skills. Some of the things Mr. Chao taught us was how to properly handshake a person to either greet or introduce yourself to a person. This is important because at the beginning I only felt like there was a single way to shake hands with someone and well thought it was nothing but to grab the other persons hand and simply shake it. Chao thought us that it was way more than that. That there is a certain posture one needs to keep, that there is a certain amount of force that one should use, that there are certain key words that one should use to sound professional and simply so many more things that will highly benefit us. I feel like mostly it was the fact that we got the experience more than anything and that now we can say that we are ready for this.

WBL Workshop #1

OSHA is defined as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration of the United States Department of Labor. OSHA was created to assure working men and women healthy and safe conditions at the work area. At the workshop offered by Ms. Lopez we learned that OSHA is committed to protect workers from toxic chemicals and deadly safety hazards at work. It also ensures the citizen workers that they should not have to choose between their lives and their job so they are able to maintain a safe environment for all. According to statistics ever since the OSHA support knocked on the doors to the public, workplace injuries, illness and deaths have decreased its numbers dramatically. OSHA also makes sure that the law gets reinforced in case your employer is not giving you the proper safety plan or instructions are the workplace. Overall their job is to keep you protected even at your own job. It is important that one as a worker, that we know our rights and have proper knowledge of what is going on around us. You should also know that your employer has the responsibility to provide a safe workplace. The workplace must follow all OSHA safety and health standards. Employers must make sure to correct all health problems. OSHA also requires that the employees wear masks or any other equipment while there are being changes on the workplace if there had to be. Your employer is obligated to provide safety training in a language you are able to understand. You could file a complaint which will be completely confidential by visiting their website or going to the nearest office available.

WBL Workshop #6

The last WBL Workshop that we had was about basically financial management,  how to be wise when it comes to handling a good amount of money, know how to save, how to spend and invest so we could at the end see the positive outcome. The first thing was to go over bank accounts in which included how to use both credit and debit accounts and how to read statements. I think that for the most part that is where people start failing, when they do not fully understand their statements and for some reason think that the amount is right or that the interest is okay when it really isn't necessarily you who is making a mistake. We also learned about the importance of paying your credit cards as soon as possible to avoid any charges or fees which i agree in being so true. I am a believer in that paying the minimum just doesn't do much but creates you more problems so its always a good idea to pay more than the minimum if you are able to. Another thing i found useful was knowing exactly what comes in your payroll. It is important to know the deductions so you know exactly how much gets taken from you. For example the social security money that the government takes, medicare, federal, state and local tax as well as workers compensation. How to find the income was also explained to us. We were also told about the importance of saving money and how so many people end up spending the money they do not have via credit cards. And pretty much how investing will create a huge change on our lives.

Lab #11

The purpose of lab 11 was for us to understand how we can call different functions into one element for example for the two elements that are shown when you go over one of them, then you can see how the text changes,  how the color changes and then for one of them the text changes one more time. Life is just easier if by the time you create the elements you give it an id so you can find it later on easier. Also you can tell it how fast or slow you want it to stay or fade out and what you want it to do. This is useful for the future in case you want to use it for design and just make your page more appealing.

Lab 12

For lab 12 we had to basically create a type of mini dropdown menu to output the answers of some questions about our favorite subject in school. I chose art class because I just really enjoy drawing or painting. The most important about this lab is that we were able continue onto our knowledge on JQuery and put it into practice. We were also introduced into three different html tags. <dl> which means description list, <dd> is used to describe a term or name in a description list and <dt> defines a term or name in a description list as well.  All of this could be done with the simple code shown in the picture to your JS folder. But another thing you would need to add is css to your document in order to make it a bit more appealing and to make it easier for the viewer to understand the point. Some of the things you can change are the font family, the font size, the border size and to obviously make sure the colors match.

Lab 10

For lab 10 we had to introduce the basics of JQuery. All we needed to do was create four type of buttons to show how they hide, show, fade in, and fade out. In my opinion JQuery just seems to be so much simpler than any other programming language and the thing is that with this you dont exactly need to watch out for quotation marks and what not because it does its job without any trouble either way. The code i used is shown here but to be more explicit all that you really need is to give the specific part you want to change an id. This will come handy later on because you will not only be able to call a function on that specific element but also you will be able to perform any css changes to it and give it a little design.

                           

WBL Workshop #5

Friday, March the fifth I was given the opportunity to attend the TEN80 education workshop sponsored by the U.S Army held at York College. It was a really fun event. We were noticed that we were all going to attend to a different category this to where 6 different workshops were available. The Lead, the Pitch, the Race, the Game, the Beat and the Code. I was told to go to code and so we followed two guys who were representatives of that single workshop.  Afterwards they took us into the working area and we were given some little project that we had to complete in small groups.  I worked with a complete stranger from another school but I found it usefull in the sense where I got to actually talk to someone and whatever she knew I learned and whatever I knew I'd pass it onto her. So i put into practice one of the soft skills which is communication and also working in groups.  So the little project was about creating our own video game. I found it interesting because we used a program that i had never seen before but it felt nice when i recognized some pieces of code. After this we were supposed to come up with another game without many instructions given, because we didnt have enough time we weren't able to complete it but I feel like for the most part the lady that was in charge of us did know how to cover the key factors of the whole presentation. We were then back at the auditorium with the rest of our classmates,  we grabbed lunch and that was all for the day.  I did enjoy this trip,  I gained a lot of knowledge, I met new people and most importantly I completed another requirement to graduate with a CTE diploma.

CTE expo 2017

So the CTE expo for this year was conducted Monday the 16th of February throughout the course of the day. Since I am a senior this was my last expo. This event is for freshman students only,  students from both the web design and the video production academy were to show freshman all the work that we do throughout the whole last three years of high school. In a way the purpose of this was to convince freshman to join our academy not just because it looks nice for our reputation but also and most importantly because being in here has just been the best class I've had in high school. Not because it gives me college credits but because I have learned so many things and have had so many good experiences that if I had the option to choose again I would definitely go for the web design academy. This event went from first period all the way to ninth. It has always been a fun activity overall because you get to talk to new people and get to show them the work you could be the most proud of. But it has its negative side in the way that you are always afraid you wont get to convince them because some of the freshman maybe were to shy to ask questions that remained unanswered and that could be why they dont end up applying or simply the fact that they do not seem interested.  I did get to talk to a couple of them and for the most part they seemed focused and seem to be engaged on the conversation.

H&R Block homework

• How can I earn money?  The way I could earn money is mostly doing the things I am legally allowed to do. As a young teenager I would have the option to earn money the easy way, like washing the car or even cleaning the room which I knew was my responsibility.  But noe that I am on my last year of high school I would be able to babysit or maybe even work at a deli. Unfortunately my age prohibits me to work as a cashier but perhaps stocking the shelves with new products.

• Credit cards credit cards are a major helpful thing to obtain. My parents both decided on a single one by receiving counseling from the banks and some friends whom have had experience. Young people should get a credit card after their first job because the first one is usually just practice, or honestly whenever they feel like they are ready. By this I mean that whenever they have had all the teaching and they actually prove that they can handle it on their own. 
• Expectations and hopes. My guardians have high expectations from me when it comes to money. This is because I am the youngest one from the family and well they have all gone through the bank issues so now they are there to teach me everything I need to know.

• Mistakes. The kind of mistakes they wish I avoid fall into the debt category.  Most of their mistakes were the fact that they would not pay on time so that would cause them to get fees and so they had to pay more. Also they suggested to not get many credit cards. To get a maximum of 4-5 cards if in case one day I want to get my own house or something like that. This because I could get confused and pay late so my whole credit will get ruined. 

• Financial recommendations and tips. One major financial recommendation they have for me is to always make a list of like for example groceries so I don't go over my budget and well obviously look for weekly offers to save up. Also to set up remainders of when to pay so I could avoid fees therefore my credit does not get ruin.  

• Role Model. Currently my role model is my mother because she knows how to administrate money. She has never ran out of time on when to pay so she has not gotten any fees and therefore she her credit hasn't gotten ruined so if she were to apply to new credit cards she'd get them with a good amount.  So I hope to avoid any minor mistakes she made now that I know its consequences. 

Lab #9

For lab 9 we had to create a validation form of our own based on our html and javascript knowledge. The first thing to do was to create a table and fill it into what was name, last name, gender, date of birth, email address, telephone number and the address where the user resides. Creating a validation online form was a very interesting to do because we did not only learn a new skill but also because just in case later on we want to create a website to like for example sale some product, then we could use this to integrate a page for the user to enter their shipping information and of course personal information. Another thing I learned is that we are not supposed to as for the persons social security if the website isn't governmentally approved. It is illegal to do so. Overall not many of us were able to complete this project but for all we know is that certain skills were reinforced and that we of course learned how to manage our time more wisely.

Calculator Project

For project #1 we had to create a calculator using mostly JavaScript. This was probably the hardest project we had to complete during this semester because even though we had more than enough time to do, most of us keep focusing on the design than actually making it work and personally it was kind of too late when I noticed. This project was hard because it required a lot of research on our own of something that we barely had knowledge of. This project will be useful for our future because now we have developed skills on knowing how to work with operations and specially if it is a calculator because it really looks appealing at any time you want to make your website more professional looking. I liked the fact that even though we didn't learn much about calculators and operations at the beginning, we were able to figure it out. Our teacher would every day teach us something knew which I found to be a very smart method because for something so complicated like this, she went little by little in order for us to slowly swallow the information we received.

Lab 8

Lab 8 was a quick demonstration of the different kinds of loops. Loops are handy whenever you want to run the same code over and over again, with each time executing a different value. Loops can execute a block of code a number of times. There are four different kinds of loops. The for loop, the for/in loop, the while loop and the do/while loop. The for loop is often the tool you will use when you want to create a loop.

            Syntax is

                  for (statement 1; statement 2; statement3)}

                            code block to be executed

                  }

       *Where as statement 1 is executed before the loop starts, statement 2 defines the condition for       running the loop and statement 3 is executed each time after the loop has been executed.

• The for/in loop are loops through the properties of an object.
• The while loop can execute a block of code as long as a specified condition is true.

            Syntax is

                  while(condition) {

                             code block to be executed

                   }

• The do/while loop is a variant of the while loop. It will execute the code of block once, before checking if the condition is true, then it will repeat the loop as long as the condition is true.

            Syntax is

                 do{

                         code block to be executed

                     }

                 while (condition);

WBL Workshop #2

Yesterday Monday 19th was the child labor laws and workplace safety workshop conducted by Ms. Lopez for all the CTE academy students which included video production and web design. Personally this workshop was very helpful for me because I am currently in the process of having my intership done and as a worker I made sure I knew my rights and all the procedures. First we were explained that the minimum wage was nine dollars, that we have the right to a safe work place and if this isn't happening then we have the right to file a complaint. We went over the jobs that one as a minor is allowed to do, also the amount of hours we are supposed to complete including the hours we are allowed during the holidays which are 4hrs from Monday to Thursday during school days and up to 8hrs Friday, the weekend and during holidays. One thing that I found very useful was certain things that the person that hires you asks you to do but you by law aren't supposed to. This is important because for some students they just go to their work place without any knowledge of these things. Another thing I found interesting was the sexual harassment topic. Sometimes people agree to their boss's orders because they do not want to lose their jobs or because they are not exactly aware of the signs. Sexual harassment could happen at any time, at any place and to anyone. We were told that if we felt uncomfortable at the work place for some reason, to inform our counselor or someone we feel okay talking about it with because we are all protected by our own union. We also entered into the proper equipment discussion which for the major part it's just about knowing that you have the right to acquire a separate time of just training so you could within that time ask any questions and be thought of how to use any equipment that you are asked to. The last area we went over was a review of how important it is to preserve a good communication with the person that hires you. It is important for you and this person to find different ways to communicate,  this in case someone happens to you and you can't attend to work that day then they'll know and you'll just end up being the responsible one for making sure that they knew. Communication is just the key to work at a safe and comfortable environment.

Booleans

JavaScript booleans represent either true or false values. We use Boolean() function to determine whether an expression is true or not. To compare conditions you can use equal to (==), greater than (>) and less than (<) symbols. This operators can be used to determine equality or difference between variables and values. You may also use (!=) to determine that the two expressions are not equal to each other. You could also use operators to assign a value to a variable based on some condition. So for example you want to come back with a certain statement based on the users condition, you can use the following line

     variablename = (condition) ? value1:value2

 in which case value one would return "You are old enough" and value two would return "You are old enough".