Day one: 3/3/14
Today, I didn't meet my mentor, necessarily, because she had other business she had to tend to. So, I conferenced with her dad, Reed Hodgin, who happens to be the founder of AlphaTRAC, and he gave me the down low, basically, about what AlphaTRAC is all about. It turns out that there is a lot more to it than I had originally thought. He told me that AlphaTRAC had been founded 22 years ago, as a small business, and grew as people came in to join. They soon grew to the large business they are today. What they aim to do, of course, is train professionals on how to respond to emergencies, Hazmat and Fire. What they have found is that first responders, in the case of an emergency, need a certain set of skills to react well. Otherwise, they have been found to freeze up in line of work. So what AlphaTRAC tries to do is train them to think differently, so that these professionals can react in time with the emergencies and deal with them better. The AlphaACT software is constantly updated to these standards. Reed also, along with acquainting me with everyone, told me what I was going to be doing over the course of my internship. It turns out, I will be doing several things at a time during what is called a "Sprint". What a sprint is is a two-week period where the employees at AlphaTRAC take their tasks, break them down, and give certain periods of time throughout the day to complete the tasks. It's definitely going to be an interesting time throughout the entirety of my internship.
Day two: 3/4/14
I finally met my mentor, Heather, today, and today went even a bit more smoothly than yesterday! I was given a list of tasks I should complete by Thursday, as I will be working Mondays through Thursdays, 9am-5pm. I've begun working on a crisis decision making tutorial that is fit for high schoolers, and I definitely hope to have that done by Thursday. On breaks, I was invited by some of the employees to play Call of Duty, which I thought was pretty cool!
Day three: 3/5/14
I worked quite a bit on my project today, but the software wasn't compatible with my computer, so I had to use the Microsoft Powerpoint software to put together a presentation based around crisis-based decision making. I hope everything goes alright when I do a check-up with Heather tomorrow.
Day four: 3/6/14
Today was an interesting day at AlphaTRAC. Other than working on the things that I have been, there was a push up contest between the employees. But it wasn't just your average push up contest. What would happen is everyone would pick a card from a deck, and the card would determine how many push ups that person had to do that round. Everyone would do push ups until the last man couldn't manage to do anymore. Then, everyone's cards were rounded up to see how many push ups each person did. The great thing about this is, there was a certain amount of luck involved in the contest, so it wasn't just about who could do the most push ups. I did alright.
Day five: 3/10/14
I began a new week today. I finished up breaking down the slides in my presentation, because some were too wordy, and I also finished the remaining slides. I started creating side-presentation notes in a word doc, but decided to begin transferring them to physical note cards. I'm going to present what I've created to the team, I believe, sometime later this week.
Day six: 3/11/14
I've been tasked out for my remaining days on internship with an online task manager, and the first task I will be working on is submitting a scenario to xcapture fire, which is a database of different past scenarios that have been recorded so that we can learn and adapt in the future. Today, I finished working on my presentation's side notes, so I should be ready to give the presentation on Thursday...
Day seven: 3/12/14
I started working on xcapture fire today, and for the majority of the day, the site was working, but tragically, stopped working around the afternoon, so I'm going to have to finish submitting all aspects of the scenario later.
Day eight: 3/13/14
Xcapture fire still wasn't working today, and my presentation has been moved to this coming Monday, and there will be donuts hopefully. On a side note, there have been frequent push-up sessions, which are kind of nice, being that I'm too lazy to do them before and after coming in for internship each day. But now, the week is coming to a close, and I think I head back home for Durango next Thursday.
Day nine: 3/17/14
I finally gave my presentation today, which I still hope to present at the exhibition this week. This was my first time actually presenting the case-based decision making vs. rational choice making tutorial, so although it flowed pretty smoothly, there is a lot I can do to edit it and prepare it for exhibition. After my presentation, I was lucky to get a lot of very helpful feedback from all of the employees, as well as very in-depth feedback from both Heather and her brother, Jeff. I'm going to be sending the final version of my presentation to Jeff before I head back to Durango, so my primary focus today was taking care of the editions I had to make to my presentation. Those will hopefully be finalized by tomorrow. Other than that, today I took care of the mentor interview with Heather, who was more than happy to provide me with information given the questions I asked her. The paraphrased interview can be found under the mentor interview tab in the LINK drop-down tab.
Day ten: 3/18/14
Today, I worked on not only my presentation, but I remembered that I had to finish filling in the info for the xCapture software scenario. Luckily, the site was working today, and although it took me a while to find all of the information from the report document (for the fire, and attached below), I was able to complete the scenario, and it feels good to have that done after the site had gone down.
Day eleven: 3/20/14
Today was my last day, and although I always think I'm going to be ready to go home, I think I'm going to miss the office when I'm back in school. There were some technical issues at AlphaTRAC today. I was able to finalize my project, but wasn't