Facebook – Week 8
April 23, 2014
This week was to be very important as I would soon be receiving feedback on my impact as an intern, and needed to make a real push for results. To some extent I cut out distractions and hunkered down. As I was learning however, performance improvements normally come incrementally and though I was improving I hadn’t yet found a shortcut to success.
After rehearsal on Monday I was pretty productive and ended up having a brief chat with Zejia, one of my teammates and started developing an extension to my project that would have wider impact that what I had completed thus far. I had to start carefully planning my time left to achieve everything left on my list.
Tuesday was much the same with one enjoyable difference. After work Gus from the Vocal Network, drove me down to San Jose for a ‘Voices in Harmony’ rehearsal. Voices in Harmony were a traditional men’s barbershop chorus and though the crowd was a good bit older than I, it still seemed a decent fit. Many of the men there had been singing barbershop for decades and despite some experience I was definitely on the low end of ability
We sung two Beatles pieces, one of which had an incredibly challenging arrangement to sight read and definitely put me through my paces. However it was good to be singing challenging material again.
Another huge positive was the fact that in attendance was ‘JHo’ (Jonathan Ho) my former mentor in the Penn Glee Club. After rehearsal two others and we headed off to a bar in Cupertino for ‘Afterglow’, to sing tags. Unfortunately I couldn’t stay too late and at about midnight caught an ‘Uber’ back to my place in Mountain View.
Wednesday and Thursday went pretty smoothly. I definitely was getting into rhythm now and didn’t need as much support from my teammates in order to get done what I needed to. I tried to clean up as much of my original project as possible in order to really get cracking on a little more flexible solution to the problem that I was initially trying to solve. Thursday night I caught the shuttle from work to the Caltrain station and caught it to Millbrae, just outside of SFC. From there it was the BART train to the airport for another trip to Penn!
As I had acquired silver status on the ‘star alliance’ frequent flier system, I was able to skip the long lines for check-in and security and within about five minutes of arriving at the airport was through to the gate. As per usual my United Airlines flight was delayed, so I paused to sit and eat some food I had brought with me. Eventually we boarded and, at about ten past midnight we departed.
The weather was fair and we had a strong tailwind, so we arrived in Philly just past seven. I slept decently on the flight but four and a half hours was not enough for me to be well rested for the weekend! The next day was to pose a challenge to me in staying awake.