My Thanksgiving Break

My break was no way near as fun as Meredith’s but on Wednesday after work my dad picked me up at Drexel and we headed home back to Howell, NJ. Once I got home I hung out with my best friend from high school Johnny and caught up with him and we chilled and watched the Knicks game.

On Thanksgiving day, me and my parents went to Brooklyn and ate at my grandfather’s house. It was just relaxing time for the four of us. After that we headed home and voted against going Black Friday shopping because we just did not know any good deals or really needed anything that badly. Haha

The next two days, I just hung out with some more friends and just relaxed, this whole holiday was pretty much just relaxing and doing as little as possible haha. I played Call of Duty Black Ops 2 which is amazing by the way! But that was pretty much my fun for the Thanksgiving break. This is sort of random but something fun I did yesterday was I went to my first Eagles game which was really cool! It was freezing though by the 3^rd quarter and me and my friends all just wanted to leave!

Overall it was a nice little break and definitely one I needed! Hopefully I do something productive over Christmas break because I know when I come back I’m not going to be in the work mood at all…hahaha.

Hello, hello! If you think getting back into the swing of things after Thanksgiving, just wait until after Christmas/New Years! I am going to be gone for 11 days!

Alright, so tell me about your Thanksgiving break! 

Here's a little bit of what I did:
I went home to my mom's and we ate and went black Friday shopping until 3am.
I saw my best friend that I haven't seen in a year (she lives in Miami) and we went to a club and danced all night until 3am.
I went wedding dress shopping with 4 out of 5 bridesmaids and said yes to the dress!
I went on a bar crawl around old city and center city, which was a blast.
I gave my flower girl her dress and she spun around like a princess.
I went to a "friendsgiving" where 20 of my friends got together and had another feast.
I set up our Christmas tree and decorations with Andrew!

JAM PACKED.

Three Questions?! Balsphemy!

What have you been working on? 

I've been working on a top secret mission to get everyone dual monitors because they're awesome. But, I don't think its a secret anymore now that 3/4th of the office have dual monitors...

 

I've also been working on my super awesome Excel spreadsheet of AMAZINGNESS. It does everything: Shows the floor layout, Shows everyone's PC and monitor information ON the layout, Shows me everyone's warranty information via color codes ON the layout, Shows me whether or not peoples PC's are online ON the layout, and Bakes cookies and shows you the cost ON the layout.

 

Alright, that last bit may be a bit of an exaggeration. But you know what isn't an exaggeration? The importance of one of my newer projects, the QSC. QSC stands for Quarterly Service Conversation. In a nutshell, the QSC is there to open lines of communication between the Service Departments (IT, Project Management, Business Development, and Marketing) and the Business Owners (Advocacy, Membership, The Center, Education and Meetings, and Practice Management)

 

I will soon be working with Brett to get the rest of the servers virtualized (We're going Tron!) as well as working with him on a top secret but super awesome project, stay tuned for more.

 

What's the most exciting thing that happened in the past three weeks? 

Hmm. For me, the past three weeks have been pretty horrible. My Uncle passed away (thus me not being here the first half of the week) and we found out the hard way that my sister is now allergic to peanuts (don't worry, she's fine now).

 

But the word exciting, to me at least, has to be something thrilling, wondrous, and happy. So, the only thing that meets those prerequisites to be considered exciting, would be my 21st birthday! 

 

How did you like the board meeting experience?

It was alright. Lot of heavy lifting and fancy(compared to our normal attire) clothing. Same as it was last year.

What have I been up to?  Email reporting, email reporting, and more email reporting.  Weekly reports, bi-weekly reports, monthly reports, statistical projects, and analysis projects, if anyone needs an email report, I have them all.  But that’s not all that has been going on the past three weeks.  I said goodbye to my old supervisor, Celisse, and hello to my new one, Hayley.  I started working with Hayley and Irisa on a market research project.  Also, I continued the work on store shipping and reports. 

I don’t really lead a very exciting life, so this question is difficult.  I think the most exciting thing to happen in these past three weeks was throwing two of my friends a birthday party (They have the same birthday and they’re dating so cute)  I am going to do more exciting things in the future incase this question is asked again.  

I would give my board experience two thumbs up.  Nice people and good food, what more could you ask for.  One of the board members was from the town next to my home town.  It was exciting to learn that some people from New Hampshire actually do other things besides hunt and get snowed into their houses.  I called my parents to tell of this new discovery, but they didn’t believe me.  I hope he comes back soon so he can call my parents, maybe they will believe him. 

Over the past three weeks I have been working on a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I have been doing a number of things on Excel, lots of web updates and doing research for a project I was recently included on. I was also recently taught registration for HM13, it’s going to be a blast!

The most exciting thing that has happened to me in the past three weeks is that I FINALLY moved out of my atrocious apartment in University Crossings. and into a lovely house on 37^th and Spring Garden! Reasons why it’s better than my apartment in UCross:

1.       I HAVE MY OWN ROOM

2.       Free laundry (meaning I don’t have to pay $1.75 per load)

3.       My roommates are ballers

4.       There are cats!

5.       I can sleep peacefully at night without having to worry about the shenanigans going on in the bed 3 feet away from me (BECAUSE I HAVE MY OWN ROOM)

6.       No crummy boyfriends of roommates mooching off of me

7.       I HAVE MY OWN ROOM

Other than having my own room, I’d say the next best thing about my new place is the cats. I am really good at making friends with cats. When I go to a party and see a cat I know it’s going to be a great night. However, Snowflake (my housemate’s cat) has been giving me major attitude making it rather difficult to make friends with her. She hissed at me the first day and tried to claw me the next week. I was about to just forget it BUT yesterday she let me pet her, so I win this time Snowflake!

What Snowflake and I will be doing together when it snows.

As for the board meeting, I thought it was really fun. I mean what’s more fun than having a free lunch with a bunch of people who are way more important than you? Haha, those who I met from the board were really nice and had a great sense of humor so that gave them a gold star in my mind.

 

I wish I would have gotten to meet this guy and I wish he would have wore this exact same shirt to the board meeting.

WHO'S EXCITED FOR THANKSGIVING?! HOME COOKED MEALS, YES!

 

What have you been working on? 

What's the most exciting thing that happened in the past three weeks? 

How did you like the board meeting experience?

 I've been working on lots of Excel, Excel, and Excel. Oh, and a little bit of QuesGen too. 

 

Honestly though, I think the most exciting thing during these past three weeks was the singing telegram the Center got for Greg's birthday. After the craziness of the hurricane, we were able order a bellhop last minute to sufficiently turn Greg's face into a bright red tomato. Public humiliation is always the best birthday gift.

The board meeting was definitely an interesting experience. We spent about 5 minutes focusing all our brain power to try to make the seats next to us look more appealing to doctors. It worked! It was really nice meeting some of the board members, and getting to know more about them. It makes the board members seem more real, and less of just pictures on the wall!

 

What's Up, What's Happening!

What have you been working on?

Since joining the Communications team of Ashley and Brendon, I have been doing a lot of great work. My first big project I have been working on with them is updating the SHM Media Kit. I have been working on many different tasks on this project so far and it is an ongoing project that is going to take a very slow process but it has been a great way to introduce me to SHM and communications in general. Some of the ways I have been updating the media kit is creating excel spreadsheets outlining changes for the new year, looking at other medical organizations kits and creating a mock table of contents and possible page ideas for them. Our next step for this is to email out all the departments and gather updated membership data as well as information pertaining to SHM’s growth and see what we need to include in next year’s media kit. We are also looking at new creative ways to make the media kit standout such as creating a PowerPoint for the board and making the media kit more user interactive.

                Besides working on the Media Kit, other projects I have been working on are first updating and tracking social media daily. Through this process I am drafting and posting status updates and twitter posts with the most up to date information in SHM. This has been a great way for me to learn more about SHM and the amazing things going on. Tied into the social media planning and tracking are the updates to the Communications Dashboard. This is SHM’s Communications department’s monthly dashboard that tracks the most important media information and how SHM is doing compared to last month and last month of the previous year. My role in this is reporting on the Social Media aspect and relay up to date data on the users within our multiple social media sites. Also, I am using Cision to keep track of our media mentions and tracking that in excel documents as well as a way to keep up to date information on important media mentions for SHM. Another small ongoing task I am a part of is updating the rotating web banners which you see on the main page of the website. This has given me the chance to see the process that goes into a creative briefs and delivering of a final product for the SHM website.  Finally, I am doing continuous work with Ashley on HMX in creating webinar documents and help documents for new users who are having trouble with HMX as well as doing work needed for Ashley to help make HMX run smoothly.

What’s the most exciting thing that happened in the past three weeks?

A lot of great things happened for me in the last three weeks so it might be hard to pick one! One awesome thing that happened was I went to the New York Knicks/76ers basketball game with my roommates and friend. I am a huge NBA fan and a diehard Knicks fan so it was great to go see them play! I had not seen them play in over a year and a half so it was awesome to be at the game and to see them win at the same time! Plus I am a huge Carmel Anthony fan and he was my favorite player for years now and once he joined the Knicks I almost died inside! So seeing him was really cool! Another great thing I would say is going to see the awesome plays for my Theater class. This term I took an easy 3 credit Theater class and so far it has been great. The last three weeks we have seen some awesome plays and it has been great to relax after work on Thursday nights and go see plays around the city and go to places in the city I have never been to like the Wilma Theater and Plays and Players Theater. It has been an awesome experience so far!

How did you like the board meeting experience?

            The board meeting was really great! Though I did not get a chance to meet a lot of the board, it was still cool to interact with some members and let them learn about us and see what we do here at SHM. It was also cool to see the similarities people on the board had with me and other SHM coworkers. For example, one of the board members lives around the same area as me which was really cool. Sabrina also got a chance to talk to board members from California so it was cool just to see little similarities with the board and be able to relate to them. Overall it was a great experience and a great way to feel like an important part of the SHM team.