A Work Place Learning Experience(WLE)

Julian MacDonnell
IOTA

WLE Reflection

The working world is an interesting place. Not interesting as in fun or exciting(well maybe interesting depending on what you do for a living). I mean interesting as in things you may hate or the unexpected things that may occur in your everyday life. I know these things for two reasons; the first is my parents and being involved one way or another in their types of work almost everyday. The second being my WLE places of work over the past two years. My parents are good examples to start off with for the working world due to the difference in jobs and difference in people they work with.
My father, working in a print and press shop for PG&E has seen his fare share of fools. Not all of the people he works with are that way(luckily), but there are enough there that cause him to have full blown migraines and headaches on an occasional basis. They do not help each other that much and actually do more complaining about each other than the actual work. The opposite is true for my mother, but when it comes to kids, they are her headaches in and off themselves. The people she works with actually help each other and make sure everyone is on the same page instead of being on different planets and speaking different tongues(not literally). Judging off the work place, based of course off of what I have seen, I have come up with some “unspoken” rules I follow.
The first I have run into time and time again is to observe your environment. It definitely can not hurt to observe your surroundings and act accordingly to ensure a good work place. Lets take my two places of work for WLE: a school and a computer repair shop. Both are different because of the people that work there and the type of work that is done at each of these places. I could not walk in to the computer repair shop and treat it as if it was the same place/ environment as a school, and vice versa. The second rule that I am pretty sure everyone already knows to follow is do not speak negatively to anyone under any circumstances. No matter how much you might hate that one person that slacks off, talks smack, tries to bring you down, etc. or what ever is going on at work, you must never lose it front of anyone. You lose if you do and will feel the full effects of the repercussions soon after. This was especially true for the school I worked at mainly because of me working around little kids. If I were to speak negativly, especially with curse words, chances are the kid or kids that heard would start to use them and then the school would be in big trouble because of concerned parents. It would not only look bad for the school, but for you as both a worker and a person. The third rule is try to know everyone and everything. It goes side by side with the first rule really; by way of doing this you can act accordingly with both your superiors and co-workers. I if were to have forgotten everyones name in my WLE places, chances are people would not rely on me because they would think that if I can not remember peoples names, what are the chances I will remember what the tasks I was given for the day are? There are others you should follow though I have found they tend to be different depending on where you work. As in my case there tends to be different rules when comparing a school to a computer repair shop.
I am not trying to say that one should look at all different kinds of working places the same way; one should have a clean mind set when going into a new place. I will especially do that for my field of work that I want to go into: game design. I have seen what game design companies can be like especially around crunch time for the release of a game. Though I have seen substantial differences in how people are treated at different places of work, that is most likely due to what they are working on and the different kinds of people working at each studio. All I know for certain is is that it will be an interesting experience where ever I am years down the road.
Personally, I have to say that I have not learned too much new about myself through this process. If I have learned anything, it is that I can take any situation and go with it no matter how hard it is. I might need help or not even finish it by myself, but I never back down from a challenge no matter how hard it is or how I feel about it. I have noticed this about me for awhile, especially during my basketball years at the CYO. No matter what others said or did, I never backed down even when I was probably close to breaking something like a bone or two. Then there is school, in which I see myself where I am today and have to say that it is because of this not backing down that I am where I am, even if it is not with the grades that I would like, but it is near impossible for anyone to get near perfect with their life with out a few trial and errors right?

~ by leon31 on May 13, 2008.