Cadenza offers its club members opportunities to record covers for Cadenza’s instagram page. I decided to sign up and cover Olivia Rodrigo’s “drivers license,” which blew up almost instantly.
Prior to actually recording the cover, I had to sign up on a Google Form and send in an “audition” recording. After being approved, I was able to take the microphone home and record the audio. The process of recording was extremely difficult. I live on a busy street, so I had to make sure that when I record, the microphone will not pick up background noise of the traffic. This was also why I could not play the backing track with my piano for the cover because there were too much traffic noise. Eventually, I decided to just use a karaoke track. I re-recorded many parts of the song since I didn’t like how a lot of the parts turned out. I finally got all the audio after about 3 hours. My voice in the final product sounds a bit more choppy as there was still a lot of static, so it was edited out. There were also harmonizing added, which makes the song sound fuller. I was really glad to see that there was positive responses to the cover. I hope that I will be able to cover another song soon.
On January 9th, I had an opportunity to represent KAS in a competition to qualify for nationals. Spoiler alert: although I placed 5th in my group in the finals, I was glad to be competing after three months.
Being in the Senior group was definitely more difficult than when I used to compete in Juniors. The standards that judges score you on is drastically raised higher. In local schools, students who excel at certain sports join their schools sports team where they practice daily for long periods of time. Naturally, they would better than people like me who can only go to practice twice a week. I was surprised that I was able to rank just below the three athletes from the best team in the city for the first round. The day of the competition was around 10°C and all I remember thinking about was why the wind was so strong. The cold weather is actually quite dangerous if athletes do not prepare themselves well for it, so I made sure to constantly be warm whether that was through wearing more jackets or warming up for a longer time. Still, I felt that some of kicks were restricted and my stretches were tighter. One of my friends in the Junior group could not continue to compete due to his knee injury, which worsened with the cold temperature. During the finals, I thought that I could have performed much better because I was not as steady as per usual; however, this showed me that the process to achieving a higher rank or improvement requires a lot of time.
For the last Cadenza performance of 2020, Invisible Children had the opportunity of selling baked brownies and chocolate-chip cookies to the audience. The executive team, which I am a part of, separated into two groups—one for baking and the other for selling. I partook in the selling and was able to raise money for donation.
Fortunately, Cadenza’s audience of students and teachers provided a large number of buyers, which allowed us to sell the goods quite quickly. I think this can also be credited to the options of goods we had, which were favorable to the audience. Some teachers even directly donated money to help raise the funds.
Throughout the last week of winter break, I had the opportunity to attend our school’s Future Leaders’ Program as an internship at 2 accounting firms. The first firm that I attended was 喬治亞聯合會計師事務所, and the second firm was 眾智聯合會計師事務所.
A typical day at firm #2! I had to calculate the sum of these receipts.
Prior to the internship, I wanted to focus on the two learning goals. They were (1) to apply existing knowledge to generate new ideas, products or processes (thinking) and (2) to collaborate with professionals (social and communication). I accomplished the first learning goal through building connections between my tasks at the internship to some Business and Economics concepts. It was really interesting to converse with my friends who also attended this internship. We definitely saw things that we learned in a real-life context. As for the second learning goal, I felt much more comfortable in doing this in the second firm as they engaged with me more. Sometimes it was not about the work I was given, but more about my daily life. I believe these discussions helped create more amicable relationships and a friendlier atmosphere.
One important skill that I applied was problem-solving. Through repetitive tasks, I developed a few systems to help me. A particular one I was quite proud of was how I helped a colleague calculate the sum of 250+ receipts at the second firm. I remember seeing the stack and just wondering how long it would take me to find the accurate answer. I asked to use the computer and use Excel spreadsheet. From the first firm, I practiced how to input data; I used the same general idea to calculate. I entered all the receipt number in the first column, the original amount of money in the second, the tax in the third, and the sum in the fourth. When I highlighted the columns, there were large differences. To effectively check my work, I input a formula in the fifth column which added the original amount of money and tax together. Then, I input yet another formula in the sixth column that calculated the differences between the fourth and fifth column to see which rows were wrong. If the difference was 0, there were no problems; if there is difference, I can easily go back to the receipt and re-enter the incorrect numbers since I have numbered the rows.
The overall experience was impactful as it demonstrates to me what it is like as an accountant. Through this, I learned that I do not necessarily enjoy being in an office the whole day, so this is something I want to think about when choosing my future career path. As for other similar opportunities provided by the Future Leaders’ Program, I would definitely like to apply to them.
