My first blog posts for Marblaze

Recently, I have been writing blog posts for Marblaze Engineering and Drafting. The posts that I write mainly surround the services that Marblaze offers, as well as some basic background information on civil engineering. Check them out!

Working with Marblaze

Marblaze is a small drafting and drawings business that originated from my father, Ariel Bilangel, a civil engineer. The business was formally run by him when he was still a freelancer, but now he has a full-time job and needs assistance in running it. Some months ago, he let me work for him and let me do admin duties. You can read more about it on the official website and on LinkedIn.I have been a part of this since May of this year.

Completed Barista Training

Just recently, I completed a barista training course! I booked myself in for two tutorial: a 3 hour class on Sunday and an additional 2 hour class on Tuesday. 

The first tutorial was all the basics of being a barista: all the aspects in order to make a coffee, as well as basic information about how to care for the machine and about basic food safety. The second class was where I learned how to make basic coffee art and more in-depth food safety.

Learning how to make coffee was actually much easier than I expected. I remember when I would watch people make coffee and feel kind of intimidated by how complicated everything looked. It just seemed so "sophisticated" from my point of view and made me consider, "maybe I won't be able to do it." Thankfully, that wasn't the case.

Overall, I performed pretty well in the tutorials. The tutor even told me that I was one of the "better" students that he's had in the past month(s), which was a major confidence booster for me. But, that's not to say that I didn't have any trouble in some aspects.

Of all the basics, frothing the milk was one of my biggest struggles. Sometimes I would froth it too much and on other times, too little. This struggle shouldn't be too hard to fix since all it takes is more experience, trial and error. 

Doing coffee art was also a major struggle for me. I learned three types of common coffee art: etching, fudge art, and free-pour (this is also my order of easiest to hardest). What's kind of funny is that one of my main hobbies in my spare time is drawing, and seeing my performance in this tutorial was really doing me little justice. 

In order to get better at coffee art, I will need to practice as much as I can. Obviously my coffee art won't look that good to begin with, which is why my tutor gave me a tip: practice on take-away cups where the art will get covered with a lid, anyway. And then, once I get better, I can move on to doing art on dine-in mugs. 

I can more confidently go job hunting now that I've got my certificates, especially since I have no prior work experience as an adult. I hope I find a job soon - hopefully a coffee-making job.

An interview!

 Just yesterday I had an interview for a job at a grocery store. It was my first interview after a couple of years. And the first interview that I managed to get all on my own since 2019-20. Because of how long I've been job-hunting (since the beginning of May), this is a major achievement for me.

Of course, I was very nervous. And this is even though I've working on my shyness and my social anxiety, so my case of nervousness may have been to some degree more intense than an average peer of mine. Before the interview I was worried just waiting for the manager to get over to where I was waiting. Even before that, I was worried that I was a bit over-dressed. All of those worries went away slowly and the interview was successful anyway. 

If there is anything positive that I can take from how nervous and shy I was, it's that whatever level of nervousness I was feeling at the time was nothing compared to how I felt before. When I get nervous talking to people, I used to stutter on my words a lot, especially to the point where I'd feel overwhelmed and want to run away. 

I even remember my mum telling me that when she came with me to my very first interview at a pizza shop, she was so worried that I wouldn't make it. I can recall her saying that I could've even passed out. Thankfully, that was never the case then, and will hopefully never be the case in the future. 

Actually, before the interview I did find some ways to cope with my feelings of nervousness. First, I did end up bringing a fidget toy to keep my hands busy because I tend to fidget a lot when I'm anxious. But when that wasn't enough, I'd seek assistance from my imagination: I thought of one of my favourite characters in fiction and imagined them in the exact scenario as me and tried to simulate how they'd cope. It's geeky, but it worked.

Half of the questions I was expecting to be asked; the other half caught me a little off guard. That's not to say that the unexpected questions were all that difficult to answer, though (I was actually kind of surprised as to how quickly I recovered after freezing during some moments). I just needed to keep this point in mind: customers are the number one priority and ensuring that their experience is more than satisfactory is the goal. 

It was especially the questions that asked why I would be the "best" candidate for the position that bugged me. I kind of have a low self-esteem, so thinking of myself in any association with the word "best" feels a little wrong to say. But I had to suck it up and push through.

At the end of the interview, I'll admit I felt *quite* relieved that it was over because I was still feeling nervous. But despite that, I was actually pretty happy that I finally got to do an interview and it ended in a neutral-positive note. I'm going to expect an email by the end of this week or early next week. I do hope I get this position...!

My motivation for studying (or lack of)

I've noticed lately that since the beginning of this year, there's been some sort of decrease in my motivation to continue studying at university. It got worse after the end of last semester when I learned that I failed not one, but two subjects out of three. It's as if it wasn't enough that I was already expecting to fail one of them by not doing well in producing any efficient work on the big project, but failing the other subject where I did actually put time and effort into producing it really stinks. Thinking back on it, I feel like I would've done so much better on the assignment that I chose to abandon.

I feel like my motivation really started to dwindle right after the moment I got my results back for the assignments where I really tried. As in, REALLY tried. I was working my butt off at that time. I was going to the university study lounge every day (except for the weekends) just so I can put in some time to work on my assignments and other things, only for me to submit assignments late and get "passable" grades, hardly changing from the grades I used to get when I didn't try as much.

It's also been happening too often that I get thoughts telling my that university is still totally out of my league, wondering how I'm still in classes after three years, and especially wondering how I even got accepted in the first place. I try to avoid them, but there's always something talking at the back of my head saying it's all true. It also doesn't help that I've got some warnings about my grades recently. I should probably speak to the university counsellor about this.

I actually did have a talk with my dad about this recently. He told me that I should take a break after this semester's over. The reason is, if I get kicked out (or whatever the consequence is) and I eventually want to get back in a few years time, I might not be able to study ever again. It's kind of worrying, but I hope I manage to make things work out. Hopefully.

Updating my resume Day 2

My next step here was to work out the way that it looks. I decided to bring the columns from three (with two small columns) to two (with one narrow column). I felt like the resume would look less crowded like that. And, I'm also getting rid of that godforsaken experience list. It was unnecessarily excessive and looked messy, as well. Anyways, here's what my layout plan looked like:

Since working around Google Docs isn't that much of a hassle for me, getting started on creating my resume went pretty smoothly. All I needed was to thin the margins and create a two-column table. Also, unlike my old resume, I've decided to add some colour. It's a light yellow (yellow being my favourite colour) which I hope looks nice and maybe even professional. Here's how it is now. It won't be too long until the resume's completion!

UPDATE: I've got all the details down. It could be worth a proofread though. You can see the resume here: https://afbworksite.neocities.org/Resume%20-%20Angelica%20Bilangel%20(3).pdf

Updating my resume

For a while, I haven't really been liking the way my resume looks. Although it gives a fair amount of useful information (with some being a little unecessarily excessive), it's overall look is kind of... unappealing - somewhere on the line that separates bland from ugly and cluttered. For a visual representation of what I mean, here's the way it looks:

Inevitably, this has lead me to decide to remake it completely from scratch,

My first step is to jot down all the main important bits of information that will go on my resume, like my contacts, history and skills. To make this easier for me, I looked up quick examples of the kinds of points that go on a resume, since I wouldn't really rely on myself for this kind of information (just yet), but it wasn't anything that I didn't know already. I haven't really changed much since I last updated my resume, but I'm half-expecting there to be some kind of new piece of information added somehow. Anyways, this turned out to be a lot less writing than I thought.

Working out my skills is the hard part, though. Most of the time I think, "am I really being true to myself?" and "how much evidence do I need to back all this up?". It's also that feeling where you're kind of embarrassed because you don't want to seem like you're bragging, but it is important that you try to present yourself in the best and most honest way possible (which is kind of hard).