Week 2: May 11, 2020 – May 15, 2020
The Armchair Economist’s Apprenticeship is a weekly series documenting my progress throughout my journey in the apprenticeship module of the Praxis program. I’m currently an operations associate for a non-profit. At the request of my boss, I’ll be keeping the details of my employer under wraps for the time being.
Ownership and taking the lead. These qualities were the central theme of my second week in my apprenticeship and I’m feeling the progress I’ve made so far. My boss encourages all employees to embody our organization’s principles of individual liberty, no micromanaging, and personal responsibility.
What does this mean for employees like me? I have a lot of freedom to choose the direction of the projects I either wish to pursue or is assigned to me.
However, it also means I have little instruction from my boss.
For some people this might be terrifying because they’re uncertain of what to do, how to do things, or fear their performance is not up to par. But I see this as an opportunity to take the lead and suggest ideas for improvement.
In fact, I see this hands-off management approach as an advantage; I’m being given the room to brainstorm projects.
What I’m Learning:
One cool thing I learned at work this week:
A few years ago, I learned what freedom means from an economics perspective which is different from what most people think. Freedom is more than just our constitutional rights, or activities that the government allows us to do.
What does it mean to have more freedom?
More freedom = more personal responsibility.
And that is the one thing I learned to apply to my work this week, take responsibility for myself, in the form of giving directions, and give myself and others action items. This week my boss introduced me to one of our other employees, a scholar, about a new project. So I took the lead and emailed the scholar about setting up a Zoom call for us.
One cool thing I learned outside of work this week:
There is a little known fact about American citizenship that ought to be taught in schools. Chinese-Americans defined the modern day legal terms of jus soli, or birthright citizenship.
In 1895, an American born Chinese man by the name of Wong Kim Ark was detained in San Francisco after a visit to China. His parents were born in China and that was the opposing opinion of why he shouldn’t be allowed into the country. He was not allowed reentry into the U.S. on the basis of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (the first anti-immigration law based on race, in America). Wong sued the government and cited the Fourteenth Amendment in his defense which eventually helped him win his case.
You can read more details of United States v. Wong Kim Ark here.
This is why it’s so important to know your rights.
What I’m Creating:
One example of how I created value at work this week:
The vice president of the non-profit asked me if I could help one of their long-time donors to move boxes of books since he was moving and needed to give away some of them. There were about 300 books in ten boxes total which were successfully moved into my garage with the help of my dad, and then at the request of our archivist/librarian I created a spreadsheet for inventory purposes.
What project I’m currently working on at my BP:
I mentioned earlier about the scholar and co-worker with whom I had a Zoom call. This scholar needs my help to launch a new platform and organization loosely connected with our non-profit. His biggest hurdle was figuring out the target audience of the services we would offer in the future, basically a marketing problem.
I’m not allowed to share the details of this new project so I’ll try to make sense of what exactly I’m doing.
The challenge is to build an online platform, organize and assemble content, and build an audience. We plan to have a prototype before the end of this year.
Here is a rough proposal that I suggested to him:
- Target millennials and Gen Z because they’re more likely to learn and adopt new tech platforms.
- Younger generations are still malleable and not set in their ways yet.
- These age groups need the most guidance and one-on-one mentoring.
- More likely to collaborate and share with others – this fits right in with our future plans of creating a collaborative platform that thrives on peer-to-peer feedback.
- Our non-profit’s principles will be easier to teach and implement for millennials and Gen Z because this demographic is more likely to support local businesses. This ties into our principle of individuals.
What I’m doing to become a better version of myself overall:
Keeping track of my ideas by writing everything down even if it’s one vague word or idea. This has tremendously helped reduce my anxiety because I can be forgetful and easily lose my train of thought. A good friend of mine taught me this and I thank him for it.