For my first job shadow, I went to Koch Industries in Wichita, KS. I shadowed my sister's coworker, Kierstein Zemanick, and she showed me what she does at work. She never does the same thing everyday at work, She is on a team with three other people. They work on projects together, and they explained all of that to me and how it works. Yes, Kierstein included information as to how I can get into this field and offered suggestions. Some suggestion were to be social and be in as many groups as I can in college. She also told me not to just be in groups but to try and be the president or any leader in the group, and that will look better on my resume. She didn't have to do much training to get her job; she took business classes and general ed. She didn't do much training when she first got her job is because technology is changing everyday, so she learns new techniques everyday. I learned that I want to have a career in technology/business because technology is always going to be around and becoming more complex and I want to keep up with it. I also like how people work in groups to succeed on their projects, I enjoy working in groups because you get more input and finish quicker than you would if you were alone. I also learned that there are so many categories and jobs I can go into with a business major. My sister and Kierstein are BSA’s (Business System Analyst), but their majors are in MIS (Management Information Systems). It was very overwhelming when Kierstin and my sister first started explaining what all they do, but later on I understood the gist of it.
For my second job shadow I went to Insurance Services here in Caldwell, Kansas. I shadowed Courtney Rohrbaugh, and she's an agent that works with crop insurance. I did some quotes and that was confusing, but I eventually got the hang of it. One of the quotes I did was for a guy who wanted to see if any other insurance company would be cheaper for his wall furnace. Insurance Services own around ten to twelve insurances companies, and I did four different quotes to see if one would be cheaper than his insurance now. Courtney didn’t really tell me suggestions or information as to how she got into this field, but I don't see myself doing insurance anyway. Courtney still gets training to this day because everyone's insurance is different and she has to figure out how to work it. I learned that I still want to have a desk job including business, but I also learned I don't want to go into insurance. I don’t like how everyone is own their own; I think it would be more efficient to work on a team like in my last job shadow.
Career Report
I’m not completely positive as to what I want to study and major in college, but I think I'm going into Management Information Systems (MIS). I want to pursue this career because I’ve always enjoyed working with computers, and technology is always going to be getting more and more complex. My sister, Kati Teeter, works at Koch in Wichita as an MIS. For one of my job shadows I'm going to follow her co-worker around and see if I like it. I would like to have normal work hours and be in an office; Career Cruising also said I would be good working in the technology field. To obtain a Bachelor's degree in Business I have to attend a four year college. The tuition for Wichita State University is around $7,000, and Emporia is around $5,000 per year. My sister didn't have any training to do, so she didn't have to pay extra for that. I have some conflict with out of state tuition since my parents live in two different states so I'm not sure if I would pay in state or out of state tuition in Kansas. My dream is also to continue playing volleyball in college; if that comes true, I won't be able to have a job, so I'm hoping a sports scholarship will pay for some of my college. In Kansas the regular salary for an MIS is $50,000 at first but can increase to $70,000 and higher. The average salary in Los Angeles is around $90,000, but it also cost a lot more to live in Los Angeles than it does to live in Wichita. My dream is to go live in Los Angeles, but I want to also be close to home. Thus, I’m not sure as to where I will go after college. Am I going to stay close or live far away?
Reflective Essay
Everyone has a different childhood, some may be bad, and some may be great. My childhood unfortunately, wasn’t the best, but it also wasn’t the worst. There are three things I want to convey in this paper: when the divorce happened, and I lived with my mom; when I move out to my father’s house with my older sister and what we went through there; what it’s like now and explaining how I've grown and changed and overcame all these challenges. My parents divorced when I was six years old after they were married for over twenty years.If I’m being honest, they should've divorced a very long time ago. At that time, I was so heartbroken that my parents were getting a divorce, but now I realize they were not happy, and neither were we children. The divorcewas for the better, because they were always fighting, and cops would be getting called. My mother had pretty much full custody of us. That’s the reason my father didn’t divorce her earlier because he was scared that he was going to lose us. My two older sisters and I lived with my mother majority of the time and would only see my father occasionally on weekends. My brother was already in college at this point, so he never had to go through all the traumatizing stuff we did. The next six years of my life were the worst. My mother is an alcoholic and would be drinking every day and having her friends over almost every night all night long. We would tell them to go home multiple times during the night, but they were too drunk to understand and wouldn’t listen to us because we were children. My sisters and I would go to school multiple times having no voice because of how much we fought. My sisters did most of the fighting while I was the one to try and break it up, and to this day I still hate fightingwith a passion. My mother has gotten fired from four or five nursing jobs because she showed up intoxicated, and my father was a poor farmer who had to pay for divorce and child support. Thus, I've always been worried about money and I still do to this day.My mother is now sick from her drinking habits so her medical bills are extremely expensive. I've also had three heart surgeries already, and those surgeries aren't cheap. We had lots of bad nights at my mother's which would end with us driving all the way out to our father’s at three in the morning. If we were lucky, we got to leave; our mother would take and hide our keys from us, so we couldn’t leave, or she would threaten to kill herself if we left. My mother has had quite a few concussions, and she received one right after I was born. She was on a ladder and fell off and knocked her head on a coffee table and apparently was never the same after that, but I don't know because I was just born. My older sister and I left my mother's when I was twelve; my oldest sister was in college already at this part so it was just Shae and me. It was a bad night that consisted of her friends being over all night. I was in bed worried because I had a big basketball game the next day. Shae came into my room around two in the morning to tell me were moving out to my fathers. My mother stole Shaes keys, so things got physical. We finally got our keys and went out to our father’s for good. I haven't stayed the night at my mother's since, and I am now seventeen. My sister and I were living at my father's full time and never saw our mother. For the next four years she made my father pay thousands of dollars every month in child support even though we didn’t live with her. My father wasn’t an angel, but he sure wasn’t as manipulative and psychotic like my mother. These next years were rough too because my mother would show up to my games drunk and made a scene in front of everyone and tried to make me look bad for not living with her. This went on for a couple of years, but slowly died down whenever she started getting sick. I had so much hate for her, and it baffled me thinking of how someone could do such horrible things to her kids to mentally and physically destroy them. My mother became sick and I’ve grown and changed a lot these past years and realized that it's not good to keep so much hate in one’s heart. I had a bad childhood, but I wouldn’t change it for a thing. It brought my sisters and I closer than ever, and it made me the person I am today. Also,it showed me how and how not to treat people. I have now forgiven my mother for all that she's done, and I don’t want my last memories of her to be all bad. I have nightmares that I will find her drinking again or that I'll walk into her house and she’ll be bled out dead. Whenever she first became ill, I broke down, and I didn’t know what to do. Three years go by of sick times where we were planning her funeral in one day, but she came out of it thankfully, and is now healthier. There's a routine that usually happens: she’ll become sick and stay in the hospital for a month or so and then get out and be okay. Everything is better luckily, and I'm glad I don't have the same mindset as I did previously. Even though I didn’t have a great childhood, I know that everything happens for a reason, and I'm glad I went through it because it made me a stronger individual. Holding grudges and keeping hate in your heart won't do any good for you. I've learned to love people no matter how they treat me because I don’t know what they're going through, and being mean won't get you anywhere in life.