Extracurricular Activities:

    Although I have not really partaken in many extracurricular activities, I have chosen to spend a lot of time working and gaining as much real world experience through employment opportunities in conjunction with my education. I feel as if I have learned something different from each job, along with having certain key skills refined.

    Working within the computer industry, I was able to pick up many technical skills like networking, software troubleshooting, hardware maintenance/replacement, and more. Within the realm of management skills, I learned how to be very analytical, focused, and patient. If a computer breaks down, there can be hundreds of reasons why it breaks or doesn’t work. A person has to have patience to deal with the issue and also has to be very analytical/detail oriented, because with so many working parts within a computer, you have to be able to narrow down the possible cause of the problem. Gaining that patience took some time but it has been very useful to me within other areas of use. I also learned the stressful task of working with deadlines. Making sure you keep focus upon the ultimate goals is key when having to have certain projects finished within a time frame.

    As a teller you make hundreds of transactions a day and it can be very difficult mentally. Not only is one working with numbers but with customers as well. As a teller I learned first hand the idea of customer service along with a refinement within attention to detail. Not to mention, I became very good with numbers quickly. As a teller, people come to you with their hard earned income, simple mistakes may cost you as well as your customers, and when mistakes occur with money, the general public is not as patient as one might think. Customer service is really the key within the banking world, if you can make a person feel safe and trusted with your bank, then they will always come back. There are times when mistakes are made and a customer is upset, you have to always keep in mind that there are certain ways to handle a problem and the customer should always be treated with respect.

    My sole purpose as an assistant to a real estate agent was to help get her organized. Eventually I began to help in other aspects of real estate but my primary goal was to help my boss organize her operations. This is exactly what I took away from working with her, along with an understanding of what to value and what not to. Having to help other people organize themselves made it easier for me to step back and help myself become more organized. Within real estate you have to judge how much a home should sell for, whether or not it is worth upgrading, how to buy a home, and more. As I began to understand what concepts a real estate agent took into mind, it made me realize what I needed to value and helped to organize my priorities.

    Holding a position within the Quality Assurance/Regulatory Affairs department has been very turbulent. I was thrown into the position with little training and was given full responsibility for the department. Stressful and overwhelming at first, I have come to understand the duties my position required and have gained from it. It feels as though all the lessons I learned from my previous positions were to brace myself for this job. It has taken everything from organization, attention to detail, customer service, critical thinking, professionalism, and much more to perform the tasks that I do within this position. Seeing as how the company is small, every operation whether it is within engineering or production has a link back to quality assurance. Everything is fast paced and there is a new priority list of tasks everyday. Leadership, teamwork and a tolerance for ambiguity are three areas that I have gained the most knowledge/experience within while working for California Medical Laboratories.