Welcome to RailsConf. Let's just, like, start on time, I guess. That'll be exciting. My name is Lily Shaline. My last name is in no way phonetic, so here's a little guide for you. Lily Shaline. Very strange. You can find me on the internet as Lily Albert in all the places. I'm a software engineer at OMADA Health, where we help people avoid chronic disease by supporting behavior change. And I'm really grateful to OMADA for covering my flight and my hotel and giving me time off to come to Atlanta and talk to y'all about open source. When I am not thinking about things at OMADA, I'm usually thinking about RailsBridge. RailsBridge is an organization that puts on free weekend workshops to help make the Ruby community more diverse. We maintain a set of open source curriculums and an event management app that we call BridgeTroll. I'm currently the chair of the board. And when I'm not thinking about OMADA or RailsBridge, I'm usually thinking about Double Union, which is a feminist hacker-maker space in San Francisco, where I'm the CTO. And I maintain our membership application and management app. So at some point today these slides will be at this bit.ly, but they're not there now. Right now it's just linking to, I don't know what it's linking to. So check that out later. So what are we going to talk about? Three big things. What is a hero in open source? How to recover from being a hero in open source? And tips for being a contributor. So what is a hero? I tend to think of heroes in the Ruby community as being a lot like superheroes. Some of them have, like, special abilities that they use to make our lives better, like contributing so much, so consistently, has got to be some kind of superpower. Right? But a lot of heroes are just regular people who started helping out, figured out how to get things done, and who we've come to depend on over time. When you first think of, like, a Ruby hero, you think of someone who's up on a pedestal, someone who's a highly visible member of the community. But a lot of our heroes are actually members of the crowd. They're people who maintain gems, who make working on a Rails app so great, and you don't necessarily see them a lot. So quick confession. I am a little bit of a hero. I am the sole maintainer of Double Union's open source membership app, and I do rather a lot of different heroic things for Rails Bridge. So this is kind of great sometimes for me. It's pretty great for the community. Like, we have these heroes that do so much stuff and make writing Ruby and Rails apps so wonderful. And there are some upsides for the heroes as well. So when something's busted for the Double Union app or we need a new feature or something, I can swoop in and I have all of the context in the world and I can help out. And that leaves me feeling all warm and fuzzy and it's great. It can also be really nice to work by yourself because you kind of fly solo. You already know where everything is in the app so you can get things done quickly. I get to make large and small decisions for my projects without necessarily getting other people's input. And I don't have to worry about other people breaking the build or introducing bugs. I pretty much just have to worry about myself introducing bugs, which I do. And if you make enough contributions or get involved with the right project, sometimes people do gain some notoriety in the community. Like, who doesn't want to be Ruby famous? So, we're all going to be heroes. Let's do it right now. No, sorry. It's not that easy. There are some real downsides to being a hero. And I think the number one reason that having heroes is bad for our community is that despite all of the amazing work they do and how much gets produced, every single hero we have is a single point of failure. Silo's are really bad and we know that, but they're impossible to avoid if you're the only person working on your project.  So, that alone, I think is a good enough reason to stop being a hero.  I've definitely felt trapped by my responsibilities, especially on projects where I'm sort of the only person pushing things forward. If I leave, I worry that the project might fall apart. And then I worry that if I leave and the project falls apart and nobody cares, then what was the point in the first place? And then it's just existential dread and everyone's sad. So, how do I get here? I personally am a responsibility sponge. Like, when I join a community, I work on fixing whatever problems I see and then I end up becoming responsible for the pieces that I fixed. And if you repeat this enough time on any project, it's burnout town. So, it just doesn't work to do too much by yourself. I've actually quit Railsbridge twice in the last four years from being overwhelmed and not seeing how I could make it fit in my life. And when we use gems, sometimes the maintainer just kind of slows down their contributions, pull requests and issues pile up. And sometimes the maintainer will ask for help and nobody ever comes. And so they sort of keep half maintaining the project. And sometimes they just silently disappear and the users have to fend for themselves and you see an issue that's like, hey, this seems abandoned. Do we still, what do we do about that? So, that's quietly is a way that people burn out. But we also have visible members of the community who just rage quit.  One distinction, though, that I'd like to make is that not all prolific contributors are heroes, right? Writing a lot of code doesn't make someone a hero. It's awesome that people get things done. When I think about heroes, there are people who hold projects up by themselves. There are people who are silos, who are necessary for the project's existence. And sometimes it happens because the maintainer doesn't want other people's help or doesn't trust other people to actually give contributions. And that's terrible. But I think a more common reason that people become heroes is that they just kind of fall into it by accident.  So what can we do to help? What are some strategies for recovery? First off, I think it'd be really great if we paid people to do open source development. I think part of why people are heroes is for a lack of resources. And we would have more resources if people could actually pay their rent with open source work. If people didn't have to spend their evenings and weekends supporting open source, which then supports lots and lots of businesses making lots and lots of money. One organization I'm super excited about is new and it's called Ruby Together. It's a new non-profit trade organization, a 501C6 apparently. And they are supporting the Ruby tools and infrastructure with money donated by individuals and businesses. So you should totally check them out and get your companies to sponsor because they're pretty rad. So for you though, if getting paid to do open source isn't an option for you, what else can you do? So three big things that I would encourage you to think about are documentation, project management, and recruiting collaborators. Sadly, none of these things is right awesome code, but you should totally do that anyway, because that's why we're here. A big part of what makes a hero is that they're the only one with the tools to solve the problem. If everybody in Gotham had a Kevlar suit and a Batmobile, they wouldn't need Batman, but things would probably be a lot worse. So documentation though is one of the ways that you can give people the tools that they need to help. And the first place to start I think is kind of obvious, you read me. So you shouldn't just include how to use your library or your application, but also how to contribute. How to get the app running and the test passing, where you track your features and bugs, how you'd like to communicate if you use IRC or Slack or you have a mailing list or a Google group, giving people the basics to actually start contributing. And you probably already have some of the stuff in your read me. And it can be hard to see what's missing because you already know your project like the back of your hand. So what you do next is you find someone who doesn't know your project. I went through this with double union but not with a hippo and it was incredibly useful to get some fresh eyes on my read me and see what I was missing. Ben Balter of GitHub has a great post about open source collaboration that I'll link to in the notes for this. But one thing that stuck out from that to me was this idea of minimizing friction for contributors. So everything that we're doing here is trying to minimize friction so that people can get involved and you can not be as much of a silo. So your documentation can help with that a lot. You want to communicate your preferences like if you like squashed commits or specific formats for documentation, letting people know up front so that you're not just nitpicking their pull requests and you can focus on actually doing code review and pull requests can be really helpful because you don't want to disenfranchise people who are excited about your project. The next thing that you need to do is write down everything you do as a maintainer. There are probably a lot of things that you do that nobody knows about and nobody can help you do the things that they don't know you do. I actually recently went through this exercise with Railsbridge and I found this long list of random tasks that I'd sort of accrued over the years and a lot of them would be great responsibilities for a new contributor but I've just been hogging them because it was way easier. So once you have this list you can share it with people and ask for help with some of these things. So you can be less of a silo and other people can get a better understanding and more invested in your project. I admit I have not actually done this with my Railsbridge jobs. This stuff is hard but I'm publicly saying I'm going to do it on the flight back to San Francisco. So hold me to that. Next up, project management is hard and that's why people have jobs doing it but unfortunately we still have to do it. The workflow you use for your project matters. When you start off by yourself you can kind of keep a list of future changes in your head. This unfortunately is very hard for other people to access so you start writing things down but the tooling for this is not great. Most of the project management apps kind of assume that people will be consistent and open source projects often have completely inconsistent sets of contributors and so I do not have a silver bullet for that but you do need to find a balance between sort of your personal preference and then what is accessible to other people. On Bridgetroll we use Pivotal Tracker to keep track of our upcoming features and we inherited it from the people who started the app and it works pretty well because the people who do most of the contributing like tracker and use it and I have suspicions that it's not helping people get involved because they do have to kind of ask permission to be part of the team so we can hit the start button and then maybe that's that hurdle is too great but so far nothing else that seemed significantly better and inertia wins so on double union we use github for everything which means we can't prioritize anything but we can get creative with tags and it's great because it's super easy to find but not everybody is looking at github issues proactively so what I found helps is just emailing out the mailing list and saying like hey these are five issues that it would be great to get some help with and so far it's worked like people have picked up issues and then I know people that I should sort of like try to convince to do more things another piece of project management that is critical is the timing that you have when you reply to people's pull requests Mozilla did a study of contributor engagement and they found that if somebody receives a code review within 48 hours they were exceptionally likely to come back and make more contributions but if someone had to wait longer than seven days there was almost no chance that they were going to come back and give another contribution so this is obviously challenging if you're a solo maintainer because maybe you want to go camping for three days or four days and now the PR is sitting there but you should totally go camping you should not like bring your laptop with you and your Wi-Fi hotspot so you can respond to pull requests you really instead want to find other people who can help review those pull requests so that you're not the only person doing that which brings us to recruitment how can we actually find like these fabled contributors and co-maintenors to share our responsibilities with people we trust and no will help our project grow and succeed when you're making big feature decisions or just any feature decisions like who do you talk to hopefully you do get some input from your users talking to people is generally a good idea when you're making changes in the app but it has this wonderful side effect of letting you helping you find the people who are passionate about your project or maybe just slightly interested and whose opinions you find valuable and then you can try to recruit some of those people to help you when I'm talking to people who use the double union app there sometimes rails developers but mostly not so I have to do a little bit more targeted outreach to potential contributors which is pretty different if your project is a library if you maintain a library your users are obviously developers and they're probably Ruby developers which is awesome because it means all of your users are potential contributors but most people do work on apps in their day to day lives at work and library development can is pretty different from application development Sarah may actually gave a talk at nickel city Ruby that I'll link to in the notes called multitudes where she uses our spec as an example of how different the internals of a library are from its API and so there's a steeper learning curve for application developers when they're working with a library for the first time so keep in mind that even people who are have been professional rails devs for a while might might need a little bit more support as they get started helping with your library and that's okay so all of this can sound pretty painful instead of writing code I'm asking you to do all of this other stuff this documentation and like maybe emailing people but I actually really don't want you to do this by yourself I want you to not just become the PM of your project but find someone else to share all of these terrible responsibilities with right you want other people to help you with coding and documenting and communicating so that you're not a silo for any part of the application and when you are recruiting people it can be scary if you're working on an app that you're really invested in you don't know if someone's going to turn out to be evil right like they could be actually evil and try to ruin your app but it's much more likely I found that people will just not do anything at all they'll like show up and talk to you and then disappear so in open source I've generally just learned to manage my expectations of everyone which means it has the plus side I get really excited when anyone does anything so the bar is kind of low when you've done recruitment and you found other people and you have contributors what can you do to sort of help them grow in your project I first started at double union as the membership coordinator which meant that I had like all these spreadsheets and I had to write emails to people and I had to do all these things that were very obviously good for computers to do and luckily I'm a Rails developer and we had a Rails app so I was like oh I will just add features to make my job easier and it was awesome to the point that I was like hey what if I never email anyone and I can just focus on writing code and building tools and so I became I just worked on that somebody else got to be the membership coordinator it was great the board of double union noticed that I was like working really hard on the app and they actually gave me the role of CTO and I was like whoa that's awesome they gave me a title and a gift certificate for a massage and I was like that's awesome but unfortunately it did somewhat reinforce my heroic tendencies because I'm like I'm the boss of the code this is awesome I'll do everything but after you know a year or so of doing that I've now shifted and I'm trying to find someone to be a co-maintenor and I'm trying to build out a team instead of doing everything myself so you want to help people move from using your application or your library to maybe like helping fix bugs to maybe adding a feature and then a small small minority of them maybe could become co-maintenors there is a funnel right and how can you help people move through this funnel Mozilla in that same study found that showing someone the next bug that they could work on would dramatically improve the odds of them contributing again so just giving people a little bit of direction and encouragement can go a long way but having other people adding code and reviewing code and maybe things are getting onto master without you seeing them does require you to let go you might be like me you might really love being in control of things I really I know I can get things done quickly but that just reinforces the silo that I've built for myself so I try to remind myself that I have to let other people help even if it's lower and even if sometimes things fall on the ground even if some things don't go well I would suggest maybe non-critical bugs or features that are not super super high priority that are simpler can be reserved for new folks and marked as bite-sized in your backlog because getting people used to your workflow with smaller things means they'll be more comfortable making larger contributions in the future one of the things I learned from some folks at double union with this amazing phrase don't lick the cookies I don't know if you've heard of it before and it's the idea that like when you're working on a project with someone if you say you're going to do a thing and then you don't do it you have just licked the cookie and then just put it back on the table and that's like really gross so try to not lick the cookies as a maintainer it's especially easy because people hear you say like oh I have an opinion about this thing and even if you didn't say I am doing this definitely they might think oh well lilies got that she obviously cares she'll take care of it and so it's imperative that I if I notice that I have looked at cookie to let everybody know like hey I am not going to do that thing like I'm definitely not please take care of it I can give you context if you need it but please take it and run one thing Railsbridge is really good about doing is retros retrospectives are kind of regular meetings to look at your process and figure out sort of what's working and what's not and we do this at the end of most workshops and we get really great feedback from volunteers and participants and we grow a lot just knowing how the workshop went for people one thing that we're really bad about is ever doing them in any other context like I was volunteering with railsbridge for like two and a half years before we did any retros whatsoever and like any project whether it's like your job or a volunteer gig there's going to be challenges and they're going to be inefficiencies and without a regular mechanism for surface surfacing those problems will fester and things that you could have dealt with really effectively early on will become much bigger deals if you don't find out about them early and so you're going to lose time and people and energy to problems if you don't surface them so happy to report now we're doing more retros so far mostly as the board but I have ambitions for many more retros in the future and I think you should probably go schedule a retro with your team like now ish right after this maybe and if you don't have a team if you're working on a project by yourself you can have your own retro you can sit down and think about yours or what's going well for this project what do I want to change and maybe you could share the results of that publicly maybe it could help people know that that you do need more help but we don't just want to reflect on what's busted we also want to be celebrating people's contributions I love this so saying thank you like regularly and letting people know how you value them on your project can go a long way so even if it's just someone opening an issue to let me know that there's a typo or a dead link in a railsbridge curriculum I thank them either way like I am so grateful that people are helping improve this stuff and especially as the maintainer of a project or a leader in a project people are actually looking to you to determine how they should behave and so you can like lead people to be more awesome if you're awesome yourself and just a quick kind of housekeeping thing just don't hoard the passwords just like really if you have an app that you deploy get a shared email address get a password manager have somebody else who can publish your gem right because it's like you're not going to be around forever so sorry it's more positive things you're a new contributor you should totally do it and also there's a talk this afternoon all about this this afternoon Courtney Irvin is giving a talk in the beginner track and you should totally check it out but here's some suggestions anyway the docs might suck the docs will probably suck the maintainer of the project might not have been to this talk maybe but the good news is that you are uniquely qualified to help improve those docs because you do have these fresh eyes so please help make them better even though it might seem trivial like to make a text change and open up a pull request that's like all I did was change the text and the read me to make more sense that is incredibly useful and you are providing a gift for all future people who are using that library another thing about solo projects in particular is that they can be a little weird one person code can just like not always like it gets quirky right like if you don't have other people sort of contributing and sort of evening out things then the style can be weird so that's okay totally surmountable challenge one thing I wish that people thinking about contributing to open source new was that you totally don't need permission to open a pull request if there's an open issue and you want to tackle it just go for it you don't have to comment you can comment on the issue and say like I'm going to work on this but if you're me you're just not going to believe them because no one ever does that but you can open maybe a provisional pull request you can be like hey this is what I was thinking this is the direction I'm going in because it's a lot easier to talk about written code than discuss sort of like a potential implementation of an idea and if you do open a pull request on a project the worst thing that could happen is that like it isn't accepted because somebody else fixed it or the solution wasn't quite what the maintainer was looking for and hopefully they're going to give you some feedback or like the worst worst thing that could happen if the would be the maintainer would be a total tool and like say something really rude and like close your pull request but the silver lining there is that you know never to use that library again because you don't need to work with jerks because you're awesome another idea for contributors is to bring your own mentor to the project show a co-worker or someone at your local Ruby meetup the code that you're working on and get their feedback before submitting the PR so you're going to be helpful to get a little feedback first because the maintainer might not have time to be your mentor and if you can kind of save them the first couple cycles of feedback that's also a huge gift so here are some general guidelines for life or maybe open source happiness one thing that I would like all of us to do is take a look at ourselves and ask why we want to do this if you're currently maintaining a project are you still getting something out of your work are you still enjoying maintaining your library and if you're a prospective contributor why do you want to work on open source if it's out of like this vague feeling of obligation let me just tell you just you don't have to do it like you are not obligated to work on open source not everybody has the bandwidth and I think that guilt is a pretty terrible motivator but some great motivators are like you use a project and it has a bug and you can fix it or you got something out of your project and you really want to give back so if that's the case please please contribute to open source side note github resumes are bullshit right this idea that people have to contribute to open source in order to get jobs at places just completely it's really irritating not everybody has time to do this and this kind of practice totally favors people who have like a bunch of free time on the evenings and weekends to make contributions to open source and it also has this annoying side effect of people showing up being like I want to work on open source but they don't really want to work on open source they like want to get a job and they think that this is one of the prerequisites so if employers could just stop doing that that would be really great thank you because this is all optional you don't have to maintain a project forever you don't have to contribute to a project forever you don't have to do open source but you totally should because it's totally awesome if you want to the flip side of how optional it is is that we need accountability if we're going to make projects sustainable we need to know what happens when someone doesn't do the things they said they would and this is inevitable we need a shared vocabulary around accountability so that people know how to talk about it when they slip up and they totally fail to do something but you don't want them to feel like they're a failure as a person just because they failed to complete a task I think this is one of the things that can be most hard about working on teams because as a leader in the Railsbridge community I know that everyone's a volunteer and so I feel pretty guilty when somebody misses a deadline and I'm like hey that thing you're not getting paid to work on do you think you could finish it and so it's very important to sort of be upfront and I think retro's can totally come in handy when you have a space that everyone's just expected to be honest because part of not being a hero is like not fixing things every time they go wrong it's having a team that can handle failures and sort of keep going so to recap silos are bad we don't want people to be single points of failure they can't stick on projects forever it's not really it's not silos aren't good for the community or the users or the maintainers because we need succession planning we should all assume that we're going to stop working on a project at some point because we have no idea when we might become indisposed in the short or long term teams are awesome they can help take the burden off of you to do all the things so you can focus on what you're most excited about which can then take your project to like way more exciting places with less burnout and more unicorns thank you


And I work in the Rackham Resolution Office. Darlene, would you like to introduce yourself really quickly? Yes. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Darlene Ray Johnson. And my title is Rackham Resolution Officer. I actually wear a couple of different hats within Rackham. One being around conflict resolution and support for graduate students, but also disability accommodations for graduate student employees, as well as our academic integrity process. Fantastic. So we are here on the screen and on this slide for you to just reiterate kind of who we are and our roles. We have a lot of information to share with you just about the context of the office and then we welcome, you know, questions that you may have at any time to be put in the chat or to kind of raise hand and unmute kind of as we go along. Before we really got started, however, we just wanted to get a sense from you about kind of what you're thinking and feeling and what you're bringing with you as you've been thinking about kind of this next year and the next phase of graduate school. So we have a few poll questions that I would like for folks to engage with. I'm going to share them now. So there's three questions. One is as you think about graduate school, what are the areas you're most excited about meeting new people moving to a new place, learning new things and or advancing your research. So take a moment to kind of think about that. Question number two is as you think about graduate school, what are some areas that you're nervous about meeting new people moving to a new place, learning new things and or advancing your research. And then the last one we'd like for you to consider as well as where would you go if you ran into a problem, academic or personal while in graduate school. So we'll take a couple of minutes to do that and kind of talk about and share the results that you have submitted. So so far about 60% of people have responded. Things are kind of spreading out a little bit here in our percentages. I'll do probably one more minute to ensure that everybody has an opportunity here. About 70% of us have participated. Okay, I don't see any kind of new additions all in the poll and then just share the results with you. So question number one, as you're thinking about graduate school, what are you excited about and it seems like this is a great group of learners you're excited to be engaging learning new things probably evidenced by coming to the session and attending today, wanting to just share the survey and kind of gain information. And then thinking about what you might be nervous about a pretty nice spread here but more research focus as well around how might I advance my research. What are some things I, you know, want to be mindful of as I conduct my research, maybe I'm, you know, going into a new field from, you know, undergraduate or a previous graduate degree, some of those things, which I think is, you know, certainly reasonable. And where would you go if you run into a problem, academic or personal, we offer each of these answers so that you know that each of these are definitely opportunities and spaces you could go to get some of your questions answered. So a lot of folks mentioned their advisor which is fantastic department chair or other program staff, you might rely on family and friends for other support, depending on kind of the nature of your worry or your concern, and then campus resources. So again, we really appreciate you being able to share this with us. We offer this as a way to say graduate school is full of lots of things, lots of excitement, potentially lots of challenges. And so knowing just kind of where you can go and who you can turn to is the hope of being able to share with you a little bit more about the resolution. So what do we do the resolution office, we work with students to provide a neutral and safe environment to talk. Really, I tell people that my role is really as a listener in the resolution office to just understand a concern or an issue that you as a student might have. As a personal or related more specifically to your, your graduate work. Listening to the concerns and complaints that you might have as a result of, you know, an issue in the program or with your advisor or just something that has come up in your experience. So we always refer individuals to different campus resources so we always tell people if you're not sure where to go know that you can go to the resolution office to help offer insight and maybe more information about the types of appropriate campus resources that there may be.  We do work to kind of mediate conflicts or address communication issues, progress issues, etc. that may come up as well. And then working to advocate for a fair process to ensure that students are feeling like they are getting kind of the best for themselves in relation to kind of policy and progress. This is kind of our website page, I'll grab our actual link and put it into the chat for folks in just a second but we wanted to let you know that you can of course reach out to Darlin and I individually with our email addresses. And you can also go to the rack and resolution website. You can request a meeting here under the meet with us box. Let us know kind of a time that would work best for you the nature of your concern. And then we will follow back up with you to schedule a time to meet. We really want to direct you to this kind of now for most so that you're aware, if and when something comes up in the future, you would know, you know, where to go to request the meeting and how to reach us. In addition to meeting with students, we also offer some proactive programming and workshops related to conflict resolution and communication. And if you have ideas or thoughts around content that you'd like to be related to that or skills that you're hoping to kind of gain. We welcome your input and have a space on our website as well for you to share a little bit more about maybe what you're hoping to see or what you would like to see that maybe you've experienced in other spaces in the past. So, a number of students that we meet with and we meet with. I can't tell you how many students. They always asked so under what kinds of circumstances should we reach out to you. And so we wanted to share with you here are some options you're not limited to these options. But here's just a couple of examples of reasons why you might contact us. If you have a problem or conflicts that's involving the broader university, and you don't know where to go as Mallory indicated, you can always come to our office and talk with Mallory or myself. And if we don't have the answer we will help you locate the answer or the correct office. If you feel your concerns are not being heard so you've gone to several different individuals you've not gotten a satisfactory resolution. You can come to us and we will help advocate for you and to find a solution that works for you. If you need information about policies and procedures that are affecting you. I was saying just this morning that we have Rackham policy, you have your program policy, you may have your school college policy so there's lots of policies that you have to adhere to. And the expectation is that you know those policies, but certainly, you know, if you do not and you're impacted or affected by one, you know, it's a very good practice to be familiar with with your policies. But if you're not quite sure, like how this policy applies to you, or you believe that the policy as written wasn't applied to you fairly. You can certainly come to us and we can assist with that. We need help to resolve or mediate a dispute with a faculty member or administrative staff. So we typically do not become involved in student to student conflict we have another office on campus that can assist with that. But if you're having difficulty would say your mentor or your faculty advisor research advisor lab manager or something like that so a faculty or staff member. We need assistance in getting that issue resolved. Certainly mediation is one tool that we use to help resolve issues but there are lots in our tool belt. And we certainly talk with you try to understand what the issues are. And how are you to be very actively involved in the decision about how to proceed with with your matter or your case. So, but please reach out to us and we can assist. And if you believe your rights have been violated or have not been followed. So we also wanted to provide just a couple of examples of cases that students have brought to us. It's amazing you know students will say I, you know I never thought about taking this particular issue to an office. And we see just about everything we see the gamut in terms of student both personal and academic issues. So, so I guess I will want to go on the record to say there's not an issue. You're too small that we can help resolve. But for example, you have a relationship issue related to your advisor or your PI. And so let's say you're not getting feedback, you know despite efforts to to receive feedback. Or you're getting too much feedback and you're actually going to mothered by your advisor or mentor. Another issue is certainly just not having clear expectations from from your mentor, in terms of you know how to progress in your program or what's needed in your paper your. So, you know if you run into those kinds of issues please come see us is not that we can sort of dictate to your program around these issues. But sometimes it's about having a conversation, and we can help sort of post you about how to approach that conversation. If you have concerns about academic progress or coursework concerns. Let's say something has come up. You've been hospitalized and so you've had to miss several days or you had to go home unexpectedly to deal with a family emergency. And that's impacting your academic progress. Or there's something going on in your in your class and the instructor not necessarily following what was in the syllabus. If you have concerns about that because it hasn't impacted you negatively, certainly seek us out and we can help provide just a little bit of guidance about how to. In the lab setting, you know, labs, sometimes has three individuals sometimes they're much, much larger and sometimes conflicts are bound to happen and so if you do run into disputes with your your lab mate. And the group dynamic is just not gelling. And there are some issues and you want to figure out a way or you're interested in trying to address that in a proactive way. Come to us come to us early don't wait until the issue gets so large. And it's really hard to manage. We would encourage you to come early if you have concerns and then we can talk about a couple of tactics to help get the relationship in the dynamic back in order. Or if you have safety or protocol concerns. You can certainly reach out to us. We also provide assistance with emergency funding. Many of your programs may have emergency funding, but some of them will actually send students to rack them for emergency funds. There is an application on the rack them website. If you run into an issue graduate students are eligible. Let me back up PhD students are eligible for, I think, up to two emergency fund awards master students are eligible for one. The maximum amount per award is $2,500. We really want you to access these funds if you have some kind of unforeseen unexpected hardship that comes.  So our website will has a list of things that are eligible and things that are ineligible and rent I think would be listed as ineligible, but again we would not want someone to, you know, lose their housing. So, you know, if that's an issue, I think the best thing is if you're not sure, check in with Mallory or I, and we can help you we can also help guide you in terms of applying for these funds in a way that you're more likely be approved. And also streamline the process cut down on the amount of time that's needed to go back and forth to get the appropriate information we can help you with that. And then, if there are mental or physical health concerns, you know, one of the things that our office is is charged with doing is that we can provide an academic notification to your program. So students don't take advantage of this and you don't have to you know you may be in a program where you feel very comfortable letting your program know what's going on. And so then they can make allowances for it so if you have to make up work or take up make up exam, you know you can work that out with your program. But if you're running into difficulty getting that kind of accommodation I would say we've got Mallory or myself. So we talked about some of the resources within Ratham. I've shared about the Ratham Emergency Fund. I would like to take this opportunity to let you know that there is also an emergency fund in the Center for the Education of Women Plus, CW Plus, and it's open to all students, not just women. And they also have an emergency fund. And as I mentioned before, some of your programs might be able to provide some funding. But, you know, if in doubt, please come to Ratham. And then I mentioned earlier I wear a couple of different hats and one of those is accommodations for graduate students with disability. On the employment side, and I do want to make that clear. Students, GSIs, GSSAs, GSIs and GSSAs are covered by the GEO contract. And so you may have heard about that if, or you will, if you haven't yet you will, because that'll probably be probably a funding package. GSRAs are not covered by the GEO contract, but they are generally covered under the same provisions as the GEO contract. One of the provisions of that contract is that graduate student employees has a right to employment accommodations, and they tried to streamline that process. And so my office is the designated central office for graduate student employees seeking a disability accommodation. The accommodation request form is out there on the Ratham website. You just put in graduate students with disabilities in the search box and it should take you to that particular website. In terms of another really important policy for graduate students to know about the leave of absence policy, it applies to PhD students only. There are four types of leave, a personal leave which you can take one time, one semester only, a medical leave, military leave, and a family dependent care leave. The medical leave, so there's a couple of things about the medical leave. One is that if you are eligible for the leave of absence, the medical leave of absence, your health insurance is included. Usually the program pays half and Ratham pays half. If you run into difficulty with your program paying half, again I would say reach out to Mallory and I to assist with that. And the other thing about the medical leave of absence is that you will need medical documentation to substantiate that. You don't need any kind of documentation for a personal leave, but you do for a medical leave. And then the family independent care leave, I don't think there's any documentation, you know supplemental documentation needed for that as well. And then the last policy is called our preliminary parental accommodation policy. And so students, we have pretty good insurance here with grad care and so a number of students come here and then they start their families. This policy applies to students who give birth or who adopt the policy, both the father and the mother are eligible for the parental accommodation period.  So it's like an eight week period where you make modifications in your, your academic requirements to allow you to spend time to bond, you know, with your, your new child. So, and you apply for that a bonus to the parental accommodation policy is for students who take that parental accommodation period. Their time to degree is extended, you know, for a period. So it's not like you lose time, even if you take that eight week break. So all of those policies are available online. You know, if you need to know about it is pretty early because you're just stepping on campus. And again, you may not remember necessarily that these policies exist, but we do want you to know that if you run into difficulty, there's usually some kind of policy that is available that we can help assist you. Thanks, Ellen. So this is just a listing of the workshop offerings I had mentioned earlier to give you a sense of maybe what you could look for. So as you kind of enter and consider what your fall schedule might be, we have offered a navigating difficult conversations, community, community across difference and then some different listening circle conversations, all intended to be able to provide insight skill and just context to, you know, communication styles, complex styles, but also kind of just hearing from you like what's going on what have been your experiences what are some of the needs that you have that are kind of ever evolving as a graduate student. We have offered virtual office hours in the past and will continue to do so into the fall. They previously were on Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays and so we would just ask that as you are getting, you know, your students to be weekly and you can contact them, student newsletters, which generally count on Fridays, that you just be mindful of the links at the times that will be shared kind of within within those spaces, or a few questions again you can reach out to Eileen and I, the office intake form, or dropping to office hours if it's a kind of quick question or you just wanted to engage in some problem solving. And that's it. We have a lot of information that we covered kind of fairly quickly there might be a lot of just questions or things that we could help clarify for you. We did a few links into the chat. And so I just welcome any thoughts questions, things that perhaps we're hoping to hear, you know, but didn't as we offered this overview for you of the services within the Resolution Office. I'll just stop my share so that I can see. So we have a question our PhD students kind of GSRAs from the start. It probably depends on your program in terms of what that designation will look like. Some students could start out, you know, that could be their, their first funding opportunity is through a GSRAs or working in the lab. Again, others are the GS, I where you're teaching, and you're doing some level of teaching in the classroom. But I would say, you know, if you, if you're not, if you don't know what your funding packages at this point, please check your program. And so you'll know that other questions. We were just so comprehensive, darling, I think it's certainly a lot to take in and we didn't want to you know, lead you by saying there may be conflicts, you know, here are these resources. But again, I think as proactive as possible as you can be as a student and gathering resources, you know, making contacts getting your questions answered. You know, the better certainly at this initial stage.  Right. And, and so we think it's helpful just to let you know that that we're here. Again, as Mallory indicated you may not remember sort of all of the services and resources that we offer but if something comes up. And you know you're not sure where to go or you're not sure how to manage it you can say. And so I think that's all you have to remember, darling and Mallory said to come to them for just about anything. So, that's all you have to remember. I think. Oh great we got a question about just a link to read more about resources and Paul mentioned lots in the grad school, when I won in canvas just I would say generally the rackham site itself rackham.umich.edu has information about additional services you know fields of study finances. So, kind of like, information linked from the broader kind of campus maze and blueprint about returning to campus kind of covert crossions, all of those things so we've tried to condense as much as possible and then have information taking different spaces so that you can know kind of where to go. And also, again, and I'm totally plugging the grad school 101 portal but so I'm that guy, but yes there are resources there and we're always trying to update and add announcements and the like but also, if nothing else to submit a question form we check that daily in grad one if you just have a question don't know where the link is just go to the portal hit submit a question fill in the form and we'll get back to you to direct you to whatever resource or resources you need so that's something new we're kind of trying this year and so we encourage you to use it especially if you don't know where to go. Start by asking a question if you can't find it. Just one more thing I'd like to say about the rackham policies that I shared. The process I think is straightforward, usually you go online you complete, you know, the, the application, but a lot of time students aren't what they aren't clear about is the patient. So for example, if you decided you wanted to take a leave of absence the semester before your qualifying exam. And so students may reach out to Mallory and I just you know to talk about that so what do I need to think about what kinds of questions should I be asking. And so we can help with that piece more around the implications. Again, I think the policies are pretty straightforward, but you know what impact might that have on your standing or status in the program. You know by taking advantage of one or or another of these policies. We have the coven 19 emergency fund. So I can share from kind of the rackham perspective is that we have kind of expanded eligibility criteria under our emergency funding process to kind of considering the impact. Some dynamic circumstances that may have been a part of your experience kind of in in the pandemic. So that would be again for like your access as a student upon kind of courses beginning so next week, if there were then presenting factors related to coven 19 so some students who kind of have been active have previously sought out funds for, you know, travel expenses returning from field research. Kind of other just dynamics with living expenses rents conflict with roommates might not have been as attentive to you know public health guidance etc. So that's kind of within the rackham so I do know that my sense is this additional emergency fund you might be referring to comes from the Office of Financial Aid. And I believe there should be like a tab within your canvas account that has information about that. My sense is a pretty straightforward application and that they're kind of doing those on a rolling basis. Within the next couple of weeks. And so I would direct some more specific questions about that to OFA, or go to the site to just double check that but that is an additional kind of coven specific emergency fund that is has been made available. Anything else other things that either what we've talked about or what other folks have asked questions about have made you curious of war. Thank you Paul, the Michigan acronyms Office of Financial Aid. And some of you mentioned in the poll that you would, you know, seek out your department resources or family and friends. You know, if you needed assistance. And so I just wanted to share with you that, you know, in all of your programs, they may have an equivalent of a student services area to assist students. And they're certainly welcome to utilize those resources. So you may go your entire, you know, three to five years here and never meet Mallory and I, and that was certainly be okay. But our office is also available for students. Sometimes it's a very personal issue and we've had students say, I, you know, I wasn't comfortable sharing this information with anyone in my program. I'm glad that you're available. And as Mallory indicated, you know, our conversations are private. We don't share any information with anyone without getting your permission first.  And then there's another position in your program called a grant coordinator who does all the administrative related work within your program. They're an excellent resource. And then, and then we are available as well. I'm just going to also add to the chat information about our kind of counseling center and services so it's called CAPS counseling and psychological services. RACM itself has an embedded counselor who works specifically with graduate students and so while Darlene and I can be helpful in, you know, problem solving consulting, you know, resource referral policy kind of related things. We're certainly not clinicians in the way that, you know, a therapist or another kind of provider maybe and so a lot of students that have come to talk with us about, you know, some logistical things also have found caps to be beneficial for some of them, maybe more personal issues that they are experiencing. And so RACM, as I said, does have an embedded counselor as many other programs and so maybe that your program has a counselor that you would want to have a much more kind of confidential conversation with about concerns. And then like at Darlene, my program staff or even I, so that's something for you to consider there as well. And then we had one additional question about explaining more about leaves for PhD students. I don't know Darlene if you want to pick back up. I'd be happy to. So, you know, as I indicated there are four. There's medical leave of absence. And I think you can take up to four consecutive semesters of leave. And you need medical documentation and health insurance is usually provided along with a medical leave. That you can take one time for any reason, but you only get to take it once. There's family and dependent care and military leave. So those are the four types of leave for our PhD students. If you're a master's student, we have something called the tax study. You can work with your program if you're interested in that and you can go on the tax study for up to 12 months without having to reapply for admission to the program. So thank you for asking that question because it prompted me to to share with you about the master's kind of equivalent but there is not a leave a formal leave for master's students. We'll kind of let you consider let it simmer a little bit more if there are any other questions. I think we've offered many links things for you to kind of pull from the chat point to and certainly revisit with the 101 kind of information within the tab. So Paul, is there anything on your end that you would like to emphasize or connect with the group about. Very just to fill out today's evaluation. Keep going to the grad school 101 portal if you're not in the portal or maybe you didn't get our initial email about it or whatever just I'll be around afterwards let me know we'll make sure that you're in it. And thank you, I'm going to turn off the recording here in a second and then we can stick around if you want to ask one on one questions either by opening up your camera mic or just keep going in the chat will be around. Thank you. Everyone for coming. Thanks for a lot of you for coming to these rack on rack on 101. Sorry grad school 101 workshops. Over the last couple weeks we're going to continue to do them into the fall our next one. Well next week we have our information fair so we get if you haven't heard or seen the information about that in the many emails we've sent out. Next Thursday the 26 from 11 to 1pm it's more of a drop in drop in and then converse with over 70 different organizations on our campus see what involvement looks like see what some of these different offices on campus can do for you so if you have a specific question. You know you can hang with them for a few minutes and ask them questions and of course we have a virtual fall welcome. Next Friday, and then in terms of a program workshop, September 1 for those that are interested in taxes and how to fire taxes as a graduate student, specifically more catered towards domestic students. September 1 is our tax workshop you can sign up for that in the grad school 101 portal. You also be getting direct email invite to that as well. It's a virtual workshop but I think it is one that's very beneficial for graduate students as they're starting their career here at Michigan and even for some that have been here for a couple years people always pick up some new information and for those that are going to be filing quarterly. The first deadline is September 15 still September 1 really gives you a couple weeks to sort of get in there and and see what you need to do. Thank you Mallory thank you Darlene and thanks everyone coming from grad school 101. We will stick around in the room and recordings of this will be probably made available in the next week or two, you will get a message when recordings are up in the portal. So enjoy your afternoon everyone. Thank you.


We're broadcasting live still in the midst of unprecedented intertwined crises of coronavirus, COVID, climate, and out of control capitalism. And we all have to reconsider the things we do, or at least we should. And what you do here on the island is primarily inviting people over to then ripping them off. So anyways, we have the utmost specialist panel for that matter here with one of the finest hospitality designers, Ronald Lydgren, being with us from his Long Beach, California. Hi, Ron. Hello. And we have you, DeSoto Brown, Bishop Museum historian, who just told me and someone else that from early childhood you were interested in preserving things, and you grew up in the heydays of way more innocent hospitality on the island. But gradually growing into a major industry, too, I might add. Exactly. And don't get us wrong. As far as I understand, DeSoto, and you live that on a daily basis, and your ancestors did, too. You were very open to welcoming people. There's nothing wrong about that. It's actually really great. But then America came, or the Western civilization, and basically commodified that and cashed it in. And that's where it becomes a problem. There's dependency, there's greediness, and there are all these things that are potentially problematic. So we have at least spiritually with us someone who's even more qualified because she has a master's degree in these things in business and tourism. And it's our exotic escapism expert, Susanne, how she is pronounced in Germany and Susanne here. And let's get us next to the next slide. And you guys share how she was with us. Well, she is now Mrs. Disbang, as of this year.  But unfortunately, she was confined with her new husband through quarantine to their not particularly lavish hotel room, non-hotel room, but apartment. And I wanted to be able to get together with her, and we fortunately were able to do that on her last day. And we had a brunch at the nearby Denny's restaurant. Now, I chose this because Martin and I watched this Denny's being built near our homes, respectively. And as a non-engineer and non-architect, I marveled at how so much of this is artifice because the finished product looks as though it's made of stone and looks as though it's made of concrete and looks as though it's made of all these different materials. But in fact, a lot of it underneath is just a steel skeleton with plywood over it and then veneers over that. Nonetheless, we did have an enjoyable time there. We were conscious, however, that this is still the time of COVID. And while we were waiting, because the restaurant is only operating at half capacity and half of it has to remain empty, we had to wait outdoors to be able to get in. We wanted to sit in their outdoor seating area, which is nice that they have it, along Cuyillo Avenue. But we were told, we're not allowed to do that. That's closed. So we had to sit in the front. And ironically, when you're outdoors, where you've got a lot of air circulation, you still have to wear your mask. When you come indoors, when you're in an air conditioned environment, you take your mask off so you can eat. So it's actually the opposite of what would be the respectable or the reasonable thing to do. However, that is the reality of the upside down world in which we live today. And I was really grateful that I was able to spend time with Suzanne. We had a really fun talk. We had a really enjoyable feel. So that was nice. But of course, we couldn't help but think about all these other things that we're concerned with, even as our enjoyable brunch was going on. As we all are, yeah, and a little bit of rehabilitation, but I have to say, the older you grow, speaking about myself, the more maybe in peace you are with certain things. So revisiting the show that we did about it that you referred to at the top right and looking at these pictures, I have to say, it is a sort of a weird kind of species of like a skeletal steroid topics because the main pilasters are actually out of CMU. So maybe not. And what I, you know, after having seen so much sort of Hawaiianized in the term of cashing in stuff, this at least doesn't even try. It just, you know, is American. The American diner, it says that the client is a former banker for YCEO. So given all that, but again, as you pointed out, it's all American, it's all air conditioned, although it doesn't really have to its location. That there's still what remains the worst loss of opportunity is typologically you should have built and we're obviously biased like a primitive on there on that side really makes it out, making, you know, one story building is really a waste of land. But other than that, maybe not quite as bad as we started out with, but still, as you said, absurd sort of upside down or inside out the whole, you know, COVID prevention compliance kind of thing, different than a place we're going to go next, at least virtually on the next slide. And that's your turn, Ron. And this is on a very bitter sweet now. Yes, the day after Suzanne and Martin met a de Soto for a meal at Denny's, I was going to have the pleasure of meeting her for the very first time. And I thought with the hours that we'd spend before she got on the plane and headed off for Munich, Germany, that I take her to downtown Los Angeles up until, well, 10 years ago, downtown Los Angeles closed at five o'clock. It was just a dead city. But in the last 10 years, all the old banks and office buildings that historically used to be the West Coast's financial center, and then it all went to San Francisco, all of those buildings have all been turned into lofts. And all of a sudden there are 50 to 60,000 new residents in downtown LA. So I was going to take you to the Grand Central Market, which has been there for well over 100 years, an emporium for food and all restaurants and also some rather interesting gourmet restaurants. I wanted her to go to not Denny's, but Egg Slug. You can believe that's the name of the restaurant. They're famous for egg sandwiches and their breakfast. And I've stood in line trying to be hit there in the past of 100 people waiting to get my my egg sandwich. And you'll notice on the picture on the left that the entire front of the street of the Grand Central Market, which is right downtown in the heart of LA, is all given over to outdoor seating. And it's used, and it's very busy. And cars are just banished to wherever they need to be. And to the right, you can also see inside the market, because most of the space is in an old building, some guests sitting beneath a wonderful neon art installation. And several of those having to be located on the walls of this wonderful place. The Grand Central Market is sort of the heartbeat in the center of this new area of downtown, where these new 60,000 people have come and enlivened the city for the first time. Unfortunately, Suzanne did not get to see all of that. And Martin will be explaining what happened. Well, there would have been other goodies to add to the to the bitterness of it.  And yeah, let's not even go any further. And by the way, to the left again is like comparing locations. You got pretty nice weather too. But we got the nicer ones. So again, we're hermeticize ourselves as in the Denny's. And as you know, I don't know if we were clear enough to Soto, but they, although there was a pure capitalist is the client, the bank of Y former CEO, but he didn't do zero lot line construction. He left, you know, space interstitial space between the sidewalk and the building for outdoor seating, but it's not allowed to use. And here they do it, right? They even steal, you know, the parking from the street and dedicated to the people. That's what we want to see any ways in temperate and moderate climates and temper climates in the summer. This is beating both basically climate change and COVID. So that's the way to go. Yeah, next slide. Also, when she was still here, she was looking online for the best spots to eat. And one is called heavenly. And it's in a killing's worth, which was formerly the seaside hotel now rebranded as the shoreline. You see this easy breezy gentleman and the PI mobile in front of it. When you were here, Ron, we didn't get a chance to go to that one. And that building was basically the one and only as you told us in that respective show that at killings worth and Alfred Yee did as a spec project, as an investment, very cultivated capitalism, by the way, you know, usually when you do something for monetary reasons, you do it the fast and the cheapest way, not in that case, not in these days, not for these gentlemen. And they basically sold it to United Airlines. United Airlines is our trusted air carrier for all these years. And unfortunately, in this case, and that's the reason why you couldn't meet up and you had her met her, you know her well, but just remotely, but you wanted to see her meet her the first time in real. And that didn't happen because the plan that goes forth and back from LAX and Honolulu broke down and obviously we're lucky they found this out early enough. So she was safe. But unfortunately, you know, she missed out on the best to meet you, Ron. We throw in Jays and my hat there from this respective show when we were as we thought for no good reason, not enough good reason and quarantine. And now that little stamp there, which is upside down, which says if you turn your head around says okay, is the recognition of the United Airlines personnel ground person personnel around checking in, recognizing her fully vaccination proof of evidence that gets her all the way through to where she got that vaccination from, which is Germany, and she has safely arrived just a few hours ago. But going to the next slide, this is trying to make up to for, you know, that she wasn't able to be with you, Ron. And these are the things we desperately tried to do to make up for that because we went to your hotel, the Lalo, which is where we as the commomos put you up when you were here, visiting us for the National Symposium, and you guys were both keynote speakers there. The Lalo is on Kohio, and by the way, is an autograph collection hotel. And what that means we do later down when we get back to the Mauna Kea. And she also took the picture at the very bottom right, especially you for you, Ron, because she's a big fan of the Halle Kalani, in fact, introduced me to the Halle Kalani before we even got to know each other. So on our morning walks, she was doing the supervision, the auditing of the construction work, and we were worried because they were working on the edge of the pool, and they had been re basically doing it and re casting it and painting it. And we were worried it's going to stay that way. But then they luckily basically re tiled it with this beautiful tile that you were telling us about in your respective of Halle Kalani shows. And now we're now a third through the September, and if they hold true to their announced reopening on October 1st, I think the good news is what you can see from outside, there isn't enough time left to screw it up if they would ever do that. And we certainly count on that they're not doing that. So this is all again us desperately trying to have her time with Ron and around Ron's places and creations, and she's standing there posing for you in front of the Halle Koa and the very jungly landscape around it that makes up for the very jungly landscape at the top right and explain a little bit where that would have been and what you had as a task for her. Oh, I'm a little bit lost because that's your that's your front yard. It's a jungle front yard. Yeah, I really as of today, in fact, I finally renovated my jungly front yard after it's been trampled a bit by some of the construction people working on my renovated house. And I was going to introduce Suzanne to a bamboo grove and roses and clivia and ground ivy and you name it. And she has a strong urge to get back to gardening again. Unfortunately, I didn't get to tell or get to show her my attempts at being a green thumb. Yeah. And talking green thumb and blue tiles, that very beautiful tile pool that they kept gets us finally back to the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel that we're on. So next slide please. And we see a similar pool and that this that picture is from you to Soto you please tell us what's behind what we see. Well, as you said, we're back at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel and this is a photograph taken right pretty soon after the hotel opened. And this was the pool that was constructed at the time that the hotel was open in 1965. Now today, as we were talking about beforehand, a hotel of the caliber of Mauna Kea would probably have a huge pool with a lot of fountains, water features, lounging areas, etc. But at the time that wasn't considered necessary, particularly because in this particular setting, there's a huge beach to swim at as well. So this pool is just sort of an adjunct to the swimming that you could have in the ocean. Nonetheless, it does have a blue tile pattern on the bottom of the pool. Now, I don't know, none of us know if this pool is in fact still there today and what it looks like because the hotel has been through some really major renovations after the earthquake of 2013, I believe, caused damage to it. So, but there is a connection then the between what we just saw at the Hollywood Money and its famous orchid mosaic at the bottom pool, along with this one at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel of a similar pattern at the bottom of the pool. Yeah, and just as we said before, it speaks that, you know, in back in the 60s, and we're sort of on a break of our automobile architecture, many more shows to come. And while, you know, the Strassenkreuz are the big street cruiser boats that I associate so much with with America were big. But today's SUVs, some of them are even bigger. And that's certainly true in architecture and everything, you know, bigger, bigger, bigger microgreens movie like Super Size or whatever it's called. The houses were like 1200 square foot to begin with or even less. And then they were like 1800 and now they're like 23 or even 3000s. So things are bigger, bigger. So even though this is and you guys will talk about that even the guest rooms in this hotel were rather, you know, decently sized originally. And this, you know, ended up being the most expensive hotel in the world ever built at that time. But regardless, things that were still relatively modest and not grown out of scale, right, that's sort of our point. And again, since it's it's doubly if this is still existing, the hotel has been lucky to stay pretty original, but the landscaping and the outdoor areas, probably not. So again, kudos to Halle Kalani that they kept, you know, the the signature pool with the with the tiles that was so important and sort of smuggled into the project.  So please go back and rewatch them. Go back to the architecture. Go to the next slide. This is an exterior perspective donated by SOM.  I am a master collector. I'm the master collector of brochures and other tourists related ephemera related to Hawaii. And this is a brochure from right when the hotel opened. And you can tell if you look at the picture behind the couple that's on the beach, you can see that the palm trees are all newly planted. They haven't been growing there for very long. Now, the thing that I find interesting with the photograph on the left is from the side view, you can see that the hotel, while it appears to be a long low rectangle when you look at it from the front, actually has a stepped design that you can clearly see on the side. And what that does is gives you not only a view when you're looking towards in that direction, but it also protects the lanais below from the view from the people on the floor above. And that's because there's a lattice work or a set of louvers, if you will, made out of wood when this was originally built, that prevented you from being able to look down on the people literally on the floor below you. But it wasn't also just a big rectangular block. Now, as Martin just pointed out, however, this is not a totally unique structure because we see it in the housing that was constructed for the Munich 1972 Olympics in Germany. And that's the picture that was just added in the upper left. So there's a similarity between those two structures, the monarchy obviously being earlier from the 60s. Yeah, so we call this Terrassenhaus, which means Terrace House, doesn't take much of a weekly German lesson, that's a lame one. And so that was a very popular feature as Ron, you as the as that sightseuer, the time witness can recall, it was a very sort of fashionable thing back then, but it got very beautifully adapted to both locations, you know, in the one in Hawaii, in a tropical condition where it's always hot, it's very much it doesn't look like a plant, which these days there's biomimicry and people make the architects make things look like plants. This looks truly man made, but it basically performs a lot like nature, because it's, you know, it's staying cool. And there, while in Munich, you have the temperate condition of basically the sun being your friend in the wintertime. And so you can even, you know, heat up your space in the wintertime. So both are conditions that are very in the best sense of true modernism being very performative, basically worked fairly well. And you could, if you're like in a postmodern mood, which none of us ever is, but we know people still are, you can even say the amount of chaos looks like a volcano, right? It was erupting out of the earth and was basically in the section taking this sort of pyramid shape and volcanoes are bigger at the base and smaller at the top. So there's all these different ways to basically look at it, which, which just makes it even better. So a very sort of multi readable architecture that that for its time was, was, was pretty, was pretty, you know, not unique, as we say, was sort of, you know, in the air amongst architects, but was, was really customized that sort of international style kind of, you know, typology of terrorist house was pretty, you know, uniquely customized to the very specific conditions of, of the big island in Hawaii by architect Besset. Let's go to the next slide and go back to the other project around it, which is the golf course. And here's another brochure by your disorder. Yeah, right. And this brings up the point which we've already brought up, but again, worth mentioning, which was that the hotel was contingent, the development of the hotel was entirely contingent upon the ability to build a golf course at the site. And if it hadn't been possible to construct a golf course, the hotel would have been in no go. They wouldn't have built it at all. Now, this is something which is a fairly recent development in certainly the history of hotels. When the Royal Hawaiian Hotel opened in Waikiki in 1927 as an ultra luxury hotel, there was no golf course. It wasn't possible to build a golf course in Waikiki. Even then, they did construct the Wailaik golf course some distance away, but it wasn't considered absolutely required by the sixties for a freestanding resort hotel. It was considered a requirement. And that's why we see pictures of these two pictures showing off the fact that there is a golf course there and a very famous golf course, too, built on this really rugged coastline with one pole where you've got to tee off and get your ball all the way across an ocean inlet to where the green is. And a lot of people never bet the ball all the way over there. And how important the golf course was and still is, we see on the next slide, which is a historic picture here, where we see it had been completed even before the hotel was completed because there are still the cranes. I mean, the hotel is pretty much in a final stage of construction, but still not completed. And the last of the two show quotes at the top right allude to two other architects who have been involved and one of them who is fellow viewers Ron, the other architect who has shaped hospitality design all over the world, also having started out in Hawaii that is Pete Wimberley, your great colleague. And Pete basically had very soon after the hotel was completed, it was given to him to add on to the hotel. And then it was John Hara, who we see and his beautiful 1965 Mercedes SL Pagodi. And when Larry had fixed us up with our PMIing mobile and leaking a gas line, basically, John Hara was in the schedule for the next morning. And so John basically did the necessary remodeling after the earthquake, which was in which year, Ganda Soto? I believe it was 2013. And there was a hotel mostly came through that pretty well, but there was some significant damage to at least one wing of it. So they took that opportunity to when they fixed up the earthquake damage to close the hotel and do a really major renovation, which we will talk about more in the future. But I also want to mention too, the black and white photograph that shows the golf course in use, this was a golf tournament that was staged even before the hotel opened, which was publicized or it was broadcast nationally on television in the USA. So that was a way of promoting the hotel via the golf course before it had even opened to the public. Yeah, and talking promoting and needing to close, we're at the end of the show, but we want before you Ron, please share with us as an AIA fellow how the hotel was perceived amongst its architectural community. And we make some reference to that at the very top left, but you have something to add above and beyond that. Yes, the AIA honored the Mauna Kea for its longevity of 25. They gave it the 25 year award. And every year they they selected a building that has survived, has been successful, and they considered to be a worthy addition to the canon of fine architecture. And the Mauna Kea received that award and rightly so. Yeah, and in addition, as you can read here, it was awarded already an honor award by the AIA right after it was completed in 67. And then in 2007, it had a top 150 of America's favorite architecture list and it made it on that one. And if you go on their website, they list many more also from the hospitality realm. So it's a highly honored veteran, we can say. And with that, we leave it for now and return one more time, wrapping this up and reflecting a little bit more above and beyond and for its future next week.  Bye-bye.


It took me three months to do the course, and once I did, it all went very smoothly and got that offer letter in about four months since I started. What's happening guys? It's Shane here and in today's video I am going to be interviewing Ben. So Ben basically started off as a janitor and he wanted to get into a job where he had a lot more vertical growth because, you know, being a janitor you're probably not going to be able to make too much more if you stay in that for the rest of your life. So we wanted to get himself into an in-demand career where there would be a lot of vertical and horizontal growth opportunities. And this is when he discovered tech sales and he was able to get a job without any previous experience or a college degree. Now Ben's story is honestly really awesome and inspiring. He went from janitor to having a really promising career in tech sales and he was able to do it in a very short amount of time. So I really think you're going to love this one. Go ahead, gently tap that like button. Let's aim for 500 likes on this video and let's jump into it right now. Welcome back to the channel guys. Today I have a very special guest on the channel. Ben is with us. Ben is a sales development representative and he has one of the coolest stories I've heard. I'm actually really excited to have him share his story today. So thank you so much for coming on the channel Ben. Thanks for having me. All right, so let's get into this right away. Basically this is going to be about how you got into tech sales. So let's start at the very beginning before you even discovered tech sales. Just kind of let me know what your professional life was like and you know you can share as many details as you want but just kind of paint the picture of what your professional life was like right before you discovered tech sales. Sure. So right before I was in tech sales I was a janitor actually and before that I had well right when I got into high school I was trying to start businesses left and right. I think I've started about eight businesses. All of them have completely failed and eventually I recognized that it was because I had zero skills and zero capital and I was raising the bar like so high right I wanted to be a millionaire by yesterday and I got the opportunity to listen to things while I was working so I listened to a lot of self-help books and stuff like that and eventually I stumbled across tech sales probably through TikTok or something like that and it really it really shined like in my eyes because a light bulb went off in my head where I realized oh I'm not I'm not making any success in any of my business ventures because I have no skills or capital and tech sales allowed me to lower the bar for myself and develop a sales skill and actually build up capital to use and you know I guess being a not not an entitled child anymore. Got it and then just a few quick questions first of all how old were you at the time when you discovered tech sales? I was 24 years old. Got it and then the second question is did you ever go to college or did you ever like try to go to college and if not kind of explain what your thought process there was? Yeah so I definitely did try to go to college. I went for about two semesters two different colleges both of them were gen eds and when I took them there were a bunch of stuff that I'd already learned before and I was not learning anything that I wanted to learn and so I just figured you know this isn't for me. I can learn this somewhere else and not spend six years for a piece of paper that says that I learned it. Yeah when you're when they're charging like a thousand two thousand dollars per class it's like and then you're learning stuff you already learned in high school and you're forced to take those classes even though you don't want to take them. Yeah definitely pretty pretty frustrating and yeah one thing Troy actually told me about this this stat and that was in Switzerland college is actually free and only 20 to 25 percent of people choose to go to college whereas in the United States college costs on average about 80 thousand dollars and people go on average about 40 thousand dollars in debt and it takes like four to five years and yet 70 percent of people choose to go to college in the U.S. so we've got this really really weird cult psychology thing going on here where we think that college is the only way you can get educated which is just not true because there's many other countries out there where people get educated in many other ways whether it's you know learning online yeah this is the modern age or it's like an apprenticeship internship etc there's many different ways to get educated other than college college definitely has its place don't get me wrong but there are many situations and many different people who probably would be better served taking a different route to get into certain careers and sales development representative business development representative tech sales is one of those careers that I highly recommend to people who choose to not go to college or to people who did go to college but they didn't like it or they got a degree that's not really helping them out or they're in a career that they don't like and they want to transition into something but they don't have any experience so with that being said how did you discover tech sales walk me through that story yeah so I think like I said I think it was something to do with tiktok or social media there was a point where maybe it was like 20 I was trying to find jobs that didn't require college and I think I stumbled upon it then but then later on it was it was definitely tiktok I saw people working remotely from South America or something like that and a lot of them said they were in tech sales and then you have people who are like account executives and the enterprise level making quite a lot of money and I saw a couple of videos of them too and so that kind of sparked my interest in one tech sales and then two having a remote job and that that full package kind of came with course careers got it so you found course careers maybe through tiktok or google or blogs or something along those lines you decided to take the plunge and actually use course careers as a service what was the curriculum and course careers and everything like let me know about that yeah so at first they have you read three books how to influence people just like a total staple when it comes to this kind of stuff fanatical prospecting and spin selling which are also staples in sales but then they kind of go into different terms and vocabulary that's very often used and you go through different technologies that's used they're like hour long courses for a couple of technologies that you're going to see very commonly in the industry and then there's a level of practicing some of the things that you read about in some of the books and practicing the knowledge that you learned in the course later on throughout it you're also trying to build up your LinkedIn profile and getting used to interviewing questions and researching companies and stuff like that got it okay so how long did it take you to get a job from when you started the course to when you signed the offer letter or or actually I guess when you got your job offer because you might have gotten several job offers and then you decided to accept one later on yeah I uh I would say it was about four months it took me three months to do the course and then an extra month because my LinkedIn profile wasn't quite where it needed to be and I had to do some more interview prep before I was ready to reach out to companies and once I did it all went very smoothly and got that offer letter in about four months since I started so what is your current job like now compared to your past job yeah so my past job was like so it was just a janitor um nothing special there wasn't much thinking involved it was very laid back very easy job um but you know I mean the pay was nice I was still making more than any of my friends it was about 40 000 a year but uh now I you know I work from home which is great um I work for a company called Dunham Bradstreet which is a very big conglomerate they're involved in just about every business ever and uh it's really cool being a part of a huge company like that there's plenty of benefits which I've never had before and making more than double that now than my previous job all right so all right let's let's talk money hey listen if you're not comfortable telling me the exact numbers totally understand I don't want to be too nosy but if you're not comfortable telling me the exact numbers um maybe just kind let the audience know just ballpark what they could expect uh and kind of like an entry level job in tech sales yeah so I think a good expectation would be 55 to 60 000 a year um I make a 50k base with 30k commission so I make 80 a year as long as I hit quota and um I that's definitely realistic uh the thing is is that I'm in that higher paid position because I'm willing to do the the outbound and the outreach and uh and the calls and all that stuff to make sure that I can you know a higher value asset to the company but I think a very realistic goal would be 60 000 um you know and that's within four months of four or five months of starting the course so 60 000 is amazing um 80 000 is even better that's awesome congratulations and then by the way how long have you been working for Dunn and Bradstreet so this is still my first month um when I got my first job it was kind of strange they had kind of they canceled their internship program and then I actually worked with course careers for a month while I was transitioning to Dunn and Bradstreet and yeah I think that was your question oh got it so you actually did land an internship before you started with uh Dunn and Bradstreet yes okay got it got it okay awesome so that was that the internship that you landed at the the four month mark or was that uh earlier yeah four month okay gotcha gotcha makes sense yeah and to get an idea so within three months I've had three sdr jobs and um two of them were a 100 uh interview to job offer rate wow yeah and I would totally put all of that on just the interview prep that I was able to do with Troy the owner of course careers and some of the students that were in there and just how much effort I put into making sure I was good with the interviews there's a lot of careers out there where like the average percentage in terms of like how many resumes you send out to these companies versus how many job offers you get is something like one or two percent you know sometimes even less than that there's a lot of careers so when we're talking like you know 80 hundred percent for when you send your resume in I mean that just shows you how like that there's just a ridiculous amount of demand uh for these positions market sure yeah you mentioned that you started a lot of businesses and I was the same way I started so many businesses in high school and college I tried everything I had you know limited success here and there but nothing that you could really scale it basically would have just been a business that's like a job but I learned a lot from it so you know um definitely you know I'm happy that I did it but do you think the skills you're learning right now um in tech sales if you do decide to start a business in the future are going to help you out oh I mean undeniably I think sales in general gives you a confidence and the skill to take with you in any area of your life just talking with people interviewing you know getting a date I mean there's all kinds of applications for a sales skill um but actually like finding leads and understanding how to reach out to them and getting that first sale is just invaluable when it comes to a business and it's a skill and knowledge that I didn't have all right well hey Ben thank you so much for coming on the channel again and uh sharing your story really awesome how you were able to transition into a career that has just so much potential and you know the sky's the limit for you now and and I really think you're gonna do well in the career and later on if you want to start out a business I think you're gonna have a very good chance of being successful there as well so uh thank you so much again for coming on the channel thank you so much for having me Shane