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#5 About Money

“Financial literacy is the ability to understand how money works in the world: how someone manages to earn or make it, how that person manages it, how he/she invests it (turn it into more) and how that person donates it to help others.”

Honestly, as a sixteen-year-old student, I don’t really care about money. All I know is that my parents give me money when I need it. It sounds very boastful, and I’m not proud of that. I realized that I am now getting older and I should know how to manage my money. As I learned about financial literacy, I started to understand the importance to manage my money on the right way. I realized that I have to start thinking about what I want to do with my money. I can’t always rely on my parents. Once I have a real job, I have to manage my money.

The first thing that popped out of my head was that I (unconsciously), have been using the concepts of financial literacy. My parents give me a financial budget every week. Having a budget requires me to set my priorities. Even though I can’t really feel that I am managing money, but I think that is a small step to ecstatically manage and make decisions about my money.

I am a spender, the undisciplined one. I think saving is financial literacy concept that evades the undisciplined spender. I admit that I had to force myself at the beginning. Saving is not really my thing. I tried to save my money several times, and I found out, as I am getting older, it becomes easier to save my money. All I need is self-control. Well, and a bank account. When I did my research, I read that saving is itself an education; it fosters every virtue, teaches self-denial, cultivates the sense of order, trains to forethought, and so broadens the mind. It is true, and I can prove it myself. I can see myself spending money wiser than before. Since I am an underage student, the best thing about saving my money is that if my parents don’t want to buy something for me, I can purchase it myself.

Although I am taking baby steps in applying the concepts of financial literacy, I can feel that I’ve changed my mindset about money. I begin to understand the value of money. I’m starting to ask myself what will make me happy and what can money do for me. I believe that learning financial literacy is going to be useful for the future. It is a big step to prepare my future. We all know that life has its ups and downs, so I think it is important to have enough money in every situation. I know that happiness is not always about money, but sometimes money can buy happiness.

#sycep2015

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#4 Answering

It took hours for me seeking answers to a very simple question. What have I learned from PD series so far?

Listen and speak up.

It’s obvious that I got lots of knowledge about the internship, employment, personal branding, social media presence, resume, cover letter, etc. But for me, the most significant thing that I learned at PDs is to listen and speak up. At the beginning, I thought PD series would be full of  talks and lectures without me being involved as a talker. But then, discussion and activity segments happened. I had to speak for myself, but also listen to others. Since public speaking happened to be my (and everyone’s) weakness, I had to force myself to speak my mind. It was worth trying. The best thing about PD is that everyone needs to be involved. Even though there are some people like me who is always half-hearted, we have to get involved. At the beginning I tried, nolens volens, to vigorously participate in discussions or activities during PD. Magically, as time went on, PD became more interesting. The fact that there’s always something to learn makes it hard to miss.

Why are strong, distinct resume and cover letter important in school/job search?

I think resume provides a summary of your skills, abilities, and accomplishments. It is a quick advertisement of who you are. On the other hand, a cover letter adds focus to the resume. A cover letter can explain things that resume can't. So, having a strong resume and cover letter would be a great strategy in school/job search. In the competitive job market/school search, it is important to have a professional resume and cover letter that contains the right information. It will stand out amongst the countless other resumes and cover letters. It will give a chance of getting the attention.

Why is it important to create an honest, distinct and personal brand in your college/job application?

For me, personal branding refers to the way other people see myself. When you have a personal brand, people recognize and care about your name, what you are working on, what you offer, and what you are about. In other words, your personal branding is your reputation. If personal branding is full of falsities, I believe, people will find out the truth. When they do, they will not see your personal branding anymore, they will see you as a liar. I suspect, it’s highly unlikely you will find long-term success if your brand is a lie. It’s just like lying to yourself.

What steps are you taking to improve your personal brand and social media presence?

I’m trying to be true, but still keeping privacy. I’m not going to hide anything, but I am going to keep what I need to keep. I realized that there are no “private” in social media. So, even though I live in a free world, and I have rights to speak my mind, I have to think twice before sharing my thoughts with the world. Just like the thought that I always believed, “Every time we speak, we are prophesying our future.”

#sycep2015

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#3 Digging

It takes me forever to learn about myself. Although I know how I am as a person, I’ve always loved to hear or read something about myself. I took the online assessment and according to its result, these are my top strengths: 1.)    Context 2.)    Learner 3.)    Belief 4.)    Futuristic 5.)    Focus

If I had to choose which strength suits me well, it would be futuristic. I’m obsessed with the future. It brings me confidence. I am a dreamer. I can just sit anywhere for god knows how long just to think about my future. I love the feeling when people want to latch on to the hope I bring. The other strength that makes me interested is context. Based on my result’s description, context means that I look back and I learn from my past. It’s amusing knowing that I have context and futuristic in myself. I adore the past and the future. I get motivated by analyzing my past and planning my future. However, having those two strengths in myself make it hard for me to live in the present. Honestly, they help me to run from the present. When the present proves too frustrating, I conjure up my visions of the future and elaborate the events from my past. I am a runner. It’s such a challenge to confine myself to the present. I learn from the past, I prepare for the future, but I am not completely living in the present. My all time favorite thing to do is to read people’s biographies. I adore the beauty of every life story. Great stories never failed to help me motivate my labile soul. It makes me see the past, prepare the future, and feel that I am able to discover many insights that help me understand the present.

Digging myself, I have this struggle to face new people and new situations. It takes me a little time to orient myself. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it bothers me. I have this bad nature in myself. I easily get jealous. I’ve seen many people who can fit in everywhere in a flash, and yes, I am so very jealous of those people. I think people with adaptability are both flexible and versatile. Also, based on the brief description that I just read, people with adaptability are having this ability that happened to be the first item in my wishlist. They live in a moment. I often let the precious moments slip away and ended up with regrets. I've been trying to appreciate every minute of now. 

Now that I know my strengths and my weaknesses, I am trying to explore myself with an eye to live the best life. I believe in one of my favorite legends a.k.a Eleanor Roosevelt. She said, "the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience."

#sycep2015

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#2 Countless Kids

I am an intern at Migrant Education, which is a federally funded program that supplements educational support services for migratory children. This summer, Migrant Education has a summer school program for pre-school, pre-K, kindergarten, elementary, and high school students. When my supervisor asked me, I told her that I want to work with pre-K students. I thought it would be better not to work with the older students because I am an ill-tempered kind of person. Just after my second day, I realized I was wrong. The little kids, they are very unpredictable. Some of them are nice, some of them are very shy, and some of them are…. Hard to describe. I was having hard times trying to control my anger. I still am. As a first-timer I think I did a pretty good job. As far as I know, the kids are now comfortable with me. Building connections with the kids was the hardest challenge so far. All of “my students” are immigrants. English is not their first language, and that requires me to use body language. When they start being a little too energetic, most of the times, I have to use body language. I know it sounds fun, and it is fun, but, believe me, it takes up a lot of energy. Especially, if you’re doing that every day. My days at Migrant Ed might be boring, miserable, disordered, tiring, and other unattractive words, but despite everything, it’s been astoundingly amazing. I wake up every day, knowing that I am doing something right, something meaningful. To be honest, my first impression of the kids was “they don’t look like normal kids, they are cheerless.” They were. But there was this ambitious goal when I saw them for the first time. It might sound exaggerated, but I told myself that I will make them feel normal and happy. I never wanted to be a teacher nor to work with the little kids. But, as I said in my earlier post, I don’t like things to be simple, I like it to be complicated, and these kids are just a little too complicated. That’s why I am surviving. I am doing something out of my box. It gets better and better every day. I may not work at the largest historical museum, or the big leading company, but I am beyond fortunate with these kids. I never really listened to my teachers, but these kids, with their not-so-clear voices, made me listen to them. They made me feel like a winner just with their not-too-cute-but-so-loud laughs. Oh, just so you know, the kids can be manipulative sometimes.

I like to find out people’s thoughts. It makes me see things from different perspectives. As I went through the Internet last week, I read Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s thoughts about life. There was this sentence that I really like. He said, “A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.” It makes me think of what I’m doing now. Talking about the experience, I learned a lot of things at the first PD. The most obvious thing that I learned was not to be a quitter. I couldn’t just quit when they told me to introduce myself for 30 seconds. I couldn’t just quit when they told me to do the activities. I had to do it, and at the end of the day, I felt pretty satisfied with myself. It could be applied to many situations in my future, especially when I will finally do a real job for a living. Thinking about what I learned at my first PD reminds me of the typical saying that I’m sure everybody knows, “nothing worth having comes easy.”

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#1 Typical Introduction

FYI, I was having a hard time writing this post. I really was. This is the very first post of this blog. It’ll show my personality to all the readers. I’ve been thinking about it and I decided to be myself. I hope it will all make sense.

My name is Yuki. If you’re familiar with my name, it’s probably because you’ve heard it many times when you watched Japanese cartoons. Yuki means snow, and my parents gave me that name just because they met in Japan when it was winter. For the records, I am Indonesian with Chinese and Dutch blood going through my body. I am a full-time student. I am sixteen years old and I am going to start my junior year this September. I want to major in political science. Since political science encompasses four major subfields which are American government, international relations, comparative politics, and political theory, it’s giving me hard times to choose which one I want to focus on. Socializing is my obsession. I like to meet new people and learn people’s characters. I love to surprise myself, and that brought me to my other obsession, which is world history. This summer is going to be one of many important parts of my life because I am going to have a job for the very first time. It’s hard for me to stop when I introduce myself. So, let me end this introduction before it takes 1000 words. 

As a sixteen-year-old girl, I’ve been thinking about my future. A lot. I know that I don’t like things to be simple. I like it to be complicated, so that I can fix it. But then, I found out that I am a very perfectionist person. That makes it hard for me to work in a group. Although I like to make friends, work in a group is not my thing. I want everything to be nice and perfect in my own terms, which I know is a very selfish demeanor. Believe me, I am working on it. I know in the world of work, sometimes I have to work on a team. There are some questions that I want to be answered about working in a team. How to be professional even when I am working with people who I don’t like? How should I behave if I am being put on a team that is full of strangers? How should I deal with a rude or tricky colleague? 

I am the only child. That makes me close to my cousins. One of my cousins is a notary. By looking at her, I assume that she is a successful notary. I had this conversation with her about a week ago. I asked her how’s she doing at work. She said she is doing ok and that she loves her job. Then I began to ask what kind of problems she’s been through. She started to tell me stories about her struggles. She had many problems with her clients and her staffs. At the beginning of her career, she had to sleep with her laptop, she didn’t get time to hang out with her friends, and she worked even on weekends. She had to wake up very early and there were times when she couldn’t get her morning coffees. At the end of the day, there were still many people who judged her. She worked like that for years. Now she lives in a life that she always wanted. Until today, she is still taking risks. The path was hard, yet she slowly found her way. She gave some very good advice to me about college and life. We sure did a big talk. She said something very meaningful and I still think about it now, while I’m writing this. She said, “If you don’t want to take risks, you can’t create a future.”