Esperanza, Inc.

Hi everyone, sorry my post is late. For my senior project, I am volunteering at Esperanza, inc., which is a non-profit organization devoted to bettering the lives of the Latino Community in Cleveland. Esperanza works with many different schools by finding mentors and tutors for the children. In my project, I am experiencing first-hand the way a non-profit organization is run. I work in the Esperanza office each day, usually doing whatever work that needs to be completed like entering data in a database or filing information.

On certain days in the morning, I help teach computer classes to many adults from the area. About half of the students speak mostly spanish, with some knowledge of the English language but not much, so I'm discovering how truly hard it is to communicate when my Spanish vocabulary falls short of what I need to say. However, my vocab is expanding, and I'm familiarizing myself with computer-related vocab.

From 3-5 p.m., the school kids come in for an after school program, in which they receive food and usually listen to a speaker. The most recent speaker was from Diversity in Action, but instead of lecturing, the speaker used activities such as the Telephone game and role-playing in order to convey the importance of diversity, tolerance, and acceptance to the children. I had the pleasure of participating in these activities and observing the way the kids reacted to each exercise, making connections between what goes on in their schools and what happened in the different scenes the children portrayed. I'm enjoying getting to know the kids and discovering each one's personality. It's always exciting to see what a great difference Esperanza is making in these children's lives and how happy the children are to be there.

Parflex Division

First: Sorry this is late.
I am working at the Parflex Division of the large engineering company "Parker Hannifin." I was contacted by Jane Heim about a few months before this started. She told me that I would be working on an air tube harness #3866503 for an Oshkosh truck. That pretty much scared me from day one. I had no idea what an air tube harness was. Couldn't even guess what the numbers stood for, and I thought the "Oshkosh" was just a typo for some other word I probably wouldn't know. I didn't really bother to worry about it until I got here. Turns out an air tube harness is a bunch of long tubes attached together that are used for trucks and other vehicles. This specific harness, labeled #3899503 (or just 503 for short), is for an Oshkosh truck, a truck that is of military use. My goal was simple: learn how to make this harness and create a detailed PowerPoint that will allow any untrained worker to create this harness from scratch. When I first visited Parflex in April, the task didn't seem that hard. I watched the factory workers work on these long rubber tubes. They taped them together, wrapped them around, and placed them in a specific order. All in all, each harness takes about 45 minutes to make. Since I was new at it, I would think I would take no more than an hour. I can learn the basics of it, type up a PowerPoint, and be ready in less than a week. This seemed to be simple. Well of course it wasn't simple. Making the harness was extremely difficult. You have to follow this confusing print out that is laid in front of you and taping all of them together with the tape couldn't be more difficult. I finally was able to finish my first harness today and it took me a good two hours. I'm almost done with my PowerPoint but I know that will need much revising. The work can be fun sometimes. Other times it can get tedious and very boring. But the workers are really nice and aren't afraid to help me. All in all, this senior project is enjoyable at times.

Hi all:) Sorry I’m late.

So far my project has been pretty low key. The first week of project was also tech week for spring theatre project, so I spent pretty much every waking moment running lines for that.

As far as project goes, I just tried to lay as much groundwork as I could so that when STP was over, I could dive right in and be as productive as I could. That didn’t work as well as I would have liked because, conveniently, last week was also tech week for the show I was assistant directing at my old school St Gregs. Most everything was set in stone by that point, so all I really had to do was show up, be on book, keep the kids quiet (To my dismay, it seems they prefer this to be done non-violently). Which, if you’ve ever been in a hot sweaty gym with 150 hormonally over-stimulated twelve and thirteen year olds, you know isn’t the most relaxing task. But anyway, this week I’ve been focusing on the performance aspect of my project. Caucusing with my sub-sponsor, John Paul Soto, and my live-in musical consultant, my dad, solidifying the basics of my senior recital. Basics like venue, repertoire, date, time, invite list, etc… It’s not the most exciting, but it has to be done. Good luck all of you. Until next week.

Gotta take the data, whether you like it or not, even at NASA

The Cyclones

This week I continued testing filters, and have now been directed more towards the cyclone filters and seeing what differences it makes to have them in series or in parallel. While testing the cyclones, I got data that was different than the data my mentor had gotten in his research for a paper he was planning to publish in a month, and he quickly had to go redo a lot of his testing and change some of his figures and conclusions. Seeing this happen, and hearing how he went about it and helping him do so, I learned some important lessons.

First, you need multiple people in every lab, each with a different background. When trying to figure out what was going on, my mentor repeatedly asked his labmate questions on the fluid physics side because it wasn't his area of expertise, and then the lab-mate would come up with something, but wouldn't be able to figure out how to apply it correctly without my mentor's help, but together they figured out what had happened and were able to get the information they needed. Second, you always need to test and retest, and measure absolutely everything possible, because you never know what could come up, and even if it doesn't seem like it should happen, you have to take reality over your expectations. On a whim, my mentor decided to measure the temperature of the air inside the vacuum chamber as he ran it and discovered that the temperature with the blower running reached over 60 degrees C, which was insanely hot and could have messed up his results again if he hadn't measured it and figured out how to compensate. The moral of the story was just that you always have to be willing to change your hypothesis and cannot make conclusions until you are absolutely sure that you can explain fully what is going on, and have repeated test situations to prove it. The other important lesson that came out of this for me, is that just because a paper is published, it doesn't mean the data or conclusions are completely right, even from a place as big as NASA. You really can't trust everything you read, and have to test it yourself to figure out what is going on.


The set up I put together and modify daily to test new things. Right now it is dismantled as it is about to placed in a vacuum chamber for further testing.

But I am very excited, because this week I am going to test my rig in the vacuum chamber and get data that my mentors say no one has ever gotten. They want me to start writing up a paper and who knows, maybe I will get to be an author on a paper they publish this summer!

Week One- Esperanza Means Hope

(photo of Luis Muñoz Marín School courtesy Cleveland.com)

Hi everyone! I hope all of your senior project endeavors are going well!

I have had a great and exciting first week of project. Emi Mainardi and I are working with a local non-profit organization called Esperanza, Inc., which is a Cleveland based program that places Spanish-speaking tutors in various schools in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. Esperanza was designed to support students whose first language is Spanish, but it also brings Spanish instruction to non-native speakers. This week, we have been following our sponsor, a member of Esperanza, while she finished up her last week as a student-teacher at the Luis Muñoz Marín School.

As a quick overview, I am so thoroughly impressed by the number of bilingual students I’ve run across, some starting as young as first grade! Luis Muñoz truly is a unique school and community, as most of the students’ parents speak Spanish at home; in fact, most of the conversations before school and in-between lessons to friends are fired off in rapid Spanish.

Yet for as many people who can speak both languages fluently, there are a few who can only speak either English or Spanish. This inability to be on the same level as their peers usually results in students adopting an “I-don’t-really-care-about-school” façade, creating quite a tricky dynamic for the teachers commanding the classroom to overcome. But it doesn’t mean that underneath it all the kids don’t want to learn.

There are a couple of examples I’ve seen so far of this repeated behavior, but I’ll save that for another day. For now, I’m just content to continue taking mental notes about the lives of these young, impressively bright students! Thanks and good luck everyone! Can’t wait for week two!!

Week One - Acting & Expect Respect

This week has been crazy. I didn't really realize how much I had gotten myself into until I lived through a week of it. This past week I have done quite a lot and also realized a lot that I have left to do and fast. During my project I am continuing with teaching Acting 1 and co-directing their show that will be performed in the last week of May. Every morning this week I have showed up to help teach and run the class. Mr. L and I have been working on their scenes for their show with them and recently we gave them new scenes from the thriller Veronica's Room. The main focus this week has been on their show, Voices From the High School. The show is multiple scenes and little monologues that connect all of the scenes. We cut a couple of scenes out and based on that and our casting we had to reorganize the entire script. For the beginning of the week I focused on putting together a copy of the script in order which was actually pretty hard to do when you had a monologue and parts of two scenes all on one page that all needed to go to three different places. Then, the focus switched to blocking all of the transitions. Mr. L wasn't able to be at school a lot of the week so I had to do this all on my own and I actually found out on the spot on Wednesday. I had to throw something out there and hope it worked. In the end, in class on Wednesday I blocked all of the transitions for the first half of the show. It's pretty complicated because I set it up so there were three chairs on each side of the stage. When chairs were needed for a scene they came from those chairs. Then, I had to have different people sitting in the chairs watching scenes while people were doing scenes and some people were off stage. I thought this was the best way to do it because my class is mostly freshman and they're always very energetic and not always the best behaved. This way I only had small amounts of people off stage together and then I didn't have a lot of people on stage together for long amounts of time so they don't get bored and chat. All of the transitions new people are entering, exiting, and sitting so it is basically a giant game of musical chairs.

The other part of my project is working with Expect Respect which is a group that during the school year goes around to different schools and youth groups to teach and raise awareness about teen dating violence, abusive relationships, and bullying. I have been a part of this group for two years and this past year I have been one of the two people in charge of the Advisory Panel. I am really involved with the program and it brought me to the idea of creating a retreat that they can use for years to come starting this year. This is designed to help everyone in the program get their feet wet and get to know everyone without the labels of cast member or advisory panel and before jumping into the summer training program. Each week I will be working in the office at JFSA with Dahlia Harris on Monday and Wednesday for about 4 to 5 hours. On Monday I got my own sign in and e-mail and desk to work from. The two days I was there this week I did a lot. I created a survey for feedback from the year to help us prepare both the retreat and the training program for the summer and I sent that out to everyone. I also, sent out e-mails trying to find out who all was available for the retreat so I can plan things out accordingly. Working on the retreat, I created a generic itinerary, booked our location, and figured out our food situation because we have to keep it kosher because we are run through the JFSA.

The location I chose was the Sheep Barn that is owned by Case Western Reserve University so I also had to meet with Ginny who also works at JFSA who is an alumn so she could be our sponsor. Finally, I worked with Dahlia just on minor tasks of getting ahold of members of the group to figure out availability for upcoming performances and I also helped her work on setting things up for our callbacks that we will be having next week for the Expect Respect play.

After all that, I have really learned a lot about office work and how difficult it is to get in touch with over 30 kids and get their availability for certain dates. I also learned a lot about how well I've done over the year of gaining the respect of my students by how well they cooperated when I had to do blocking with them and by how well they treated me this week when I was left on my own to teach them. I was surprised at how much I was actually doing at JFSA and how much I was actually getting of my own and to do on my own. Next week I will hopefully be getting some video to put up from acting class.

Cooking- Week 1

We've had a long week of hard work. We started out on Monday with a basic knife skills lesson from our sponsor and a guest teacher from a local culinary school in the form of preparing a chicken stir-fry. In doing so, we learned the different techniques for cutting various food items from bell peppers to carrots to chicken. Equally importantly, we learned how to properly handle chicken so as to reduce the risk of salmonella poisoning.

The rest of the week we spent making:

-Parmesan-crusted chicken with spaghetti and a marinara sauce. This taught us how to boil water and pound chicken into thin slices. We also learned the importance of saving and reusing everything we make or don't use.

-Pizzas using the marinara sauce that we had saved from the pervious day. We made four different kinda of pizzas including Hawaiian, grilled chicken and peppers, four-cheese, and we experimented by grilling a pepperoni pizza.

-Lasagna which helped us learn how to improvise the recipe to fit the amount we want to make have fit our own taste preferences. This is helping us learn how to use our artistic license in the kitchen.

We also started the first steps to planning our benefit dinner which includes choosing the menu, reserving location, and organizing all non-food components.

-TJ Kinisky, Gadi Yungster, Ozan Cubukcu