Works of the Past for a Better Future

The best job I have had was Champs Sports; it is mainly a shoe and apparel store. I have had plenty of responsibilities, but the ones that were primary was: greeting customers, pushing extra sales like shoe cleaners and apparel along with the purchase of shoes, and making sure the store was always clean and presentable.

What really made the job exhilirating was the people who I worked with; my co-workers were all around the same age as me, including my manager. When sales were slow, we would all just have fun and chat. The talking with customers from different countries were also great because San Francisco is such a tourist place, which was really great.

Since I was working in retail, that made me communicate a lot with different kinds of people. Having the courage to talk to strangers allowed me to improve by interpersonal communication skills that I can carry with me into internship. Also, by expressing my ideas in meetings that can potentially help sales grow, is another thing that I can bring to the internship. Just having that fresh mind filled with ideas I think will really help in wherever I will be placed at.

I learned that it was a fast-paced and competitive environment at Champs because if you were too slow to approach a customer you have lost your sale to another employee. By working there brought out my competitiveness. Not only do you have to work fast, but you have to be efficient as well.

Non-Fiction Book Review

To give a brief overview of the non-fiction book "Freakonomics", it is about series of events with statistics that compares two things you would never think have any relation. Unlike economics, which some may argue is a dry and uninteresting topic, the authors, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner looks at the hidden side of everything using the tools of economic research.

The authors wrote the book to explore the hidden side of everything. Whether it is teachers and sumo wrestlers cheating, the authors found out there was cheating involved by looking at statistics. A message that was being conveyed in the book was incentives. Everyone has an incentive. As for the school teachers changing the students answers for the standardized test, their incentives is seeing a bonus pay.

The last chapter in the book is what I found really interesting. It was unbelievable how names can can be perceived in a negative way. There was an example where they sent out two identical resumes to employers; one with a white name and the other with a more african american name. It was proven that the white name received more calls back. This stood out to me because it is really unfair, and the term equal opportunity is very misleading.

The book is very easy to understand and good for those who do not read often. I highly recommend the book because it touches topics that are interesting and viewed at different perspectives.

READONOMICS

Currently, I am reading a non-fiction book titled "Freakonomics", by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner. I was never much of an avid reader growing up, it was almost immutable. Since being in Year Up, I decided to give reading a try again. The introduction of the book caught half of my attention, and if this were a reading in high school, I would have stopped for sure. But, I decided to keep on reading anyway. It turns out the book started to get more and more interesting to the point where I went beyond the required reading for the week. 


A strategy that I have found helpful for me is to just keep reading, and to not judge a book by the first chapter. At the same time, it helps to keep an open mind while reading, ask questions, or do any type of interaction with the book. I found that by asking questions or even wonder what will happen next helps a lot that will want me to continue reading. Also, by allowing yourself for at least twenty minutes a day to read will not hurt, and if you are commuting every morning you should use that time to read which has also helped me since I do not do anything on public transportation. 

By Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

To get a better understand of a book, I suggest reading the chapter twice. First, read it without annotating, but keep in mind the questions to keep that interaction alive. When you are reading the chapter the second time around, this is where you should be annotating. Again, this is a form of interaction with the book. I also find that when I am done reading a page, I sometimes do not get what I just read; I found that reading that page over again or even the page before helps a lot. 


I always found a problem with me committing to reading any book. As I mentioned earlier, that when I ride public transportation I am not doing anything but be on my phone. My commute usually takes about twenty minutes every day, and since I arrive early to Year Up everyday I usually continue my reading there until the day begins. When I started reading the first chapter, I got more and more hooked into the book because i can easily relate to some of the topics and most of them are just really interesting to read about.