My third TEDxPeachtree blogpost

Steelcase in the backyard

Link to the original article: http://tedxpeachtree.com/steelcase-in-the-backyard/

One of the favorite things I used to do when moving into a new environment was to explore the workspaces that were accessible to me. I spent the majority of my first week of college life on campus visiting buildings after buildings, hoping to find a perfect space where I would enjoy the most when studying. Six years later and over 8,000 miles away from home, I found here in Atlanta this familiar spirit that I had lost for a long time. No matter which colleges they belonged to, numerous Georgia Tech students came to the Klaus Advanced Computing Building (KACB) at the center of the campus, simply to find their own favorite spots.

Dedicated in 2006, KACB is the home to the College of Computer Science and the College of Computational Science and Engineering. When standing outside the building, you can feel the glass walls and doors are encouraging you to stroll in. The interior of the building beautifully blends a variety of workspaces that are waiting for users’ customization. Tired of the ordinary rectangular seating area and would like to create your own shape? The movable work surfaces and mobile pedestals enable users like you and me to reconfigure the workspace to fit our needs at the moment.

These unconventional workspaces were created by Steelcase, a global leader in office environment creation. For 100 years, Steelcase has been bringing human insight to business by studying how people work, wherever they work. As a longtime sponsor of TED, Steelcase has built immersive spaces that give TED attendees places to interact and collaborate. This global environment creator also launched its centennial anniversary at the 2012 TED Conference at Long Beach in California, inviting TEDsters to dream and think about the future of the world and work.

Jim Hackett, the CEO of Steelcase, has been coming to TED since 1988. “The TED conference has endorsed two key options.” he says, “One: The pursuit of knowledge is of lifelong importance. Two: The power of networks only gets stronger if you include others.” Bill Strickland’s 2002 TED talk was a great example to demonstrate this spirit. Strickland dedicates his life to helping disadvantaged kids and adults pursue knowledge by partnership with big businesses, from Heinz to Hewlett-Packard, from Steelcase to eBay.

Born in the crumbling remains of the Pittsburgh steel economy, Strickland founded Bidwell Training Center, a world-class vocational school in the toughest neighborhood in Pittsburgh with the highest crime rate. He believes that the spiritual cancers embedded in troubled students and displaced adults can be cured by showing them humanity in kindness, and by giving them second chances in an inspiring environment with sunlight, flowers, food, Herbie Hancock’s music, and positive expectations. The school has attracted world-class instructors and guests as Strickland includes others in this belief. I believe after that TED talk he again built at least one new partnership with big businesses.Like Georgia Tech students and me, the desire to be exposed to new ideas led us to enjoy the innovative design of workspaces by Steelcase. In addition, from Strickland’s talk, we learned that the desire to new ideas that could improve human life is universal, and the inspiration of the ideas can possibly be picked up just from our backyard. In the TED spirit of Ideas Worth Spreading, what ideas would you like to share with other TEDsters at the upcoming 2013 TEDxPeachtree Conference?

My second TEDxPeachtree blogpost

A Month of Unconditional Dedication to Safety

Link to the original article: http://tedxpeachtree.com/a-month-of-unconditional-dedication-to-safety/

June is National Safety Month. Each June, the National Safety Council (NSC) organizes this annual observance to educate the public and raise awareness in the leading causes of injuries and deaths. In honor of the NSC celebrating its 100th anniversary of safety awareness this year, I would like to showcase breakthroughs in safety improvement history via TED, in the order of topics the NSC is featuring each week of this month.

Week one is on Slips, Trips and Falls, with particular emphasis on falls from heights. Falling is one of the major causes of injuries and fatalities in our work places. Although he might not help you much in preventing injuries in the office, Steve Truglia has stories to share. As a stuntman, the number of times Truglia has fallen out of buildings is most likely more than I have cut my own fingers in the kitchen. See how technology has made stunts safer, and Truglia’s incredible planning for a breathtaking jump from 120,000 feet high.

The second week focuses on Employee Wellness, with an emphasis on the overdose of prescription painkillers. Deaths from overdose of prescription painkillers have skyrocketed in the past decade, but how severe is it exactly? Chris Jordan transformed a simple image of a pill by multiplying the imagery using the astonishing number of emergency room visits attributable to abuse and misuse of prescription painkillers, and anti-anxiety medications to an oversized wall image. Other imagery that raises awareness includes the destructive power of cigarettes, and various social issue images with high statistics in the United States.

The third week is Emergency Preparedness. As millions of people are displaced by natural disasters every single year, organizations are increasingly aware of the importance of emergency plans. I still remember when the HR department at my company handed me an emergency survival kit backpack during my new hire orientation, even before I had a chance to introduce myself to everyone in the room! Dedicated to solving the massive housing gap after devastating disasters, Michael McDaniel spent his own personal savings and free time to design and build a low-cost shelter that is easily transportable and post-disaster efficient.

The fourth week is on the issue of Ergonomics. The International Ergonomics Association defines ergonomics as “the scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a system, and the profession that applies theory, principles, data and methods to design in order to optimize human well-being and overall system performance.” In essence, it is the study of designing equipment and devices that fit the human body and its cognitive abilities. If you are suffering from back or neck pain while sitting at the desk reading this article, you might want to check out Niels Diffrient’s talk on important design elements of an ergonomic chair.

Every time I watch TED talks, I am fascinated by the arresting ideas, dedication and passion of  human beings. Have a safe summer with greater awareness from the NSC and I hope you enjoyed watching the great inventions and wisdom on safety in these TEDx stories.

Corporate Finance Three Principles

Back in 2009 when I was preparing for the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exam Level II, one of my studymates introduced me to the website of Aswath Damodaran. Damodaran is a Finance professor at Stern School of Business at New York University, who teaches Corporate Finance, Valuation, and Portfolio Management. This website was very resourceful when I was learning financial modeling.

Recently I revisited the website and learned that the website not only offered financial modeling tutorial, but also concepts for Corporate Finance. I like Professor Damodaran's perspective of Corporate Finance principles in this audio, and I summarized the content as below:

In order to maximize the value of the business, all of Corporate Finance is built on three principles:

1. The Investment Principle: determines where businesses invest their resources - invest in assets and projects that yield a return greater than the minimum acceptable hurdle rate. The hurdle rate should be higher for risky project. This includes assets or projects that will either generate more revenue, or cut down costs. This basically covers the whole "Assets" section on the balance sheet, such as decisions about how much and what inventory to maintain and whether and how much credit to grant to customers. This also includes which markets to enter and acquisitions of other companies. There might be regulatory and other real-world constraints on the financing mix that a business can use.

2. The Financing Principle: Choose a financing mix (debt and equity) that maximizes the value of the investments made and match the financing to nature of the assets being financed. That is, we want to pick a financing mix that minimize the hurdle rate. With a public-traded company, debt may take the form of bonds and equity is usually common stock. In a private business, debt is more likely to be bank loans and an owner's savings represents equity. Have outlined the optimal financing mix, we turn our attention to the type of financing a business should use, such as whether it should be long-term or short-term, whether the payments on the financing should be fixed or variable, and if variable, what it should be a function of. Using a basic proposition that a firm will minimize its risk from financing and maximize its capacity to use borrowed funds if it can match up the cash flows on the debt to the cash flows on the assets being finance, we design the perfect financing instrument for a company. We then add additional considerations relating to taxes and external monitors (equity research analysts and rating agencies) and arrive at strong conclusions about the design of the financing.

3. The Dividend Principle: How much earnings should be reinvested back into the business and how much should be returned to the owners of the business -If there are not enough investments that earn the hurdle rate, return the cash to the owners of the business.

Ultimate Objective: Maximize the value of the business. Consequently, any decision (investment, financing, or dividend) that increases the value of a business is considered a good one, and vice versa. The value of a company is the present value of its expected cash flows, discounted back at a rate that reflects both the riskiness of the projects of the company and the financing mix used to finance them.

How CFA Membership Has Benefited Me

The 2013 Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exam is around the corner. I volunteered to proctor one of the mock exams with Kaplan this morning. The CFA program is a three-level exam towards earning the CFA designation upon related work experience, and the designation is a global gold standard for finance and investment professionals, particularly in the fields of investment management and financial analysis of stocks, bonds and their derivative assets. I started the Level I exam in 2009, and completed the Level III in 2012. Since then, I have been an affiliate member with both the CFA Institute and the CFA Society of Atlanta. I look forward to accumulating four years of related work experience to become a CFA charter holder, hopefully, in 2017! 

There are two types of CFA memberships at the Society Level. Regular Membership is for those who has passed CFA Level I and has had four years of related working experience. Affiliate Membership is for those who are not qualified for regular membership. Take me as an example, although I have passed Level III, I have not had enough years of work experience so I am only eligible for Affiliate Membership. However, both regular and affiliate members can have access to the same resources provided by both the CFA Institute and the local CFA society. 

The CFA Institute provides learning resources, research tools, career resources, and access to contact info of all the CFA members, which was a great help for me when I was looking for a job several months ago. Two of my favorite features are Morning NewsBrief and getAbstract. When you become a member, the CFA Institute allows you to sign up for Morning NewBrief, which delivers important financial news to your email box daily. getAbstract is a vendor which summarizes every book into five pages. All the CFA members have access to all the business-related books on getAbstract for free.On the society level, the CFA Society of Atlanta hosts luncheons about once a month, featuring one speaker a time. Sometimes they do dinners as well. One of the dinners was the annual forecasting event back in February 2013, where Jim Rogers was the speaker! 

On top of those luncheons and dinners, the society also hosts career events. I have been to one so far, it was back in October 2012 and the topic was about how to get your resume noticed. Since this year, the CFA Society of Atlanta also started to host some pure networking event. The first was a cocktail happy hour in March 2013, free to members and guests - the guests had to pay for their own drinks though.

There are decent amount of volunteer opportunities with the society. Since I started volunteering in October 2012, I have been involved with different programs such as University Outreach - try to get the CFA designation noticed at universities (I have not made progress in my part...), 2013 CFA Institute Research Challenge - a business competition for grad/college students, and the CFA mock exams - as the one today.

My first TEDxPeachtree blogpost!

The Exploration Revolution: When TED-Ed met Webby

Link to the original article: http://tedxpeachtree.com/the-exploration-revolution-when-ted-ed-met-webby/

After having lived on the other side of the world for over 20 years, in 2009, I decided to come to the States to taste the feeling of leaving my comfort zone. Leaving the comfort zone was quite uncomfortable honestly. After her third attempt, I finally understood the simple sentence “How are you doing?” on the street from a friendly lady who tried to greet me. Apparently the slow-speed English learning tapes in my hometown did not prepare me well enough for the reality. With my heart in my mouth, I searched the web ferociously for good English learning websites, and that was about when I discovered TED. It did not take me long to step into TED Talks without captions from those with captions, not because my English listening ability improved at the speed of light, but because the talks transcended my original intention of purely picking up vocabularies and paved the way for a journey of exploration, from Simon Sinek’s golden circle to Boaz Almog’s superconductor, from Hyeonseo Lee’s escape from North Korea to learning how to move the whole body with the tongue withMaysam Ghovanloo at TEDxPeachtree 2012, where I finally made my first on-site exploration.

And….TED-Ed brought this journey of exploration to zenith. TED-Ed is a curated list of educational videos on a variety of topics, created under the collaborations between educators and animators. I am excited to share the news that as recent as Apr 30, 2013, TED-Ed won three Webby Awards. The Webby Awards, also known as “Oscars of the Internet”, is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet including websites, interactive advertising, online film and video, and mobile and apps. Award categories range from Arts to Community, from Shopping to Weird. Two winners are selected in each category: the Webby Winner, picked by judges, and the People’s Voice winner, voted by the public. Well known Webby Awards 2013 winners include Google Maps for iPhone and Songza, a popular music streaming service provider. TED-Ed was awarded both Webby Winner and People’s Voice in Education, and was selected as the Webby Winner for Best Practices. It’s quite a recognition that Webby witnessed the education revolution hatched by TED-Ed as my exploration ventured into this newly found territory. Did you ever wonder the mechanism of thinking? Let’s take a tour with Trevor Maber on TED-Ed to explore our brains.

Here, you can see “Watch”, “Think”, and “Dig Deeper” buttons alongside the video. The “Watch” feature is similar to a typical TED talk, which plays a video. Upon completing the video, by clicking the “Think” button, you will be prompted to questions, which can be either multiple choice or open answer questions. One cool feature, among other things, is that you can click “Video Hint” and the little video on the top right corner will replay the section of the lesson where you can find the answer. For example, Maber uses a ladder as an analogy to the process of our thinking (Ladder of Inference), and there are seven rungs in total. When I was asked for the mechanism of the second rung, by clicking the “Video Hint” button it reinforced my memory of that particular detail. If you are interested in learning more about the topic as I am, “Dig Deeper” can save you some “mousewalk” on the Internet. In this case, it demonstrates some hands-on activities, as well as points me to relevant websites, to help me better understand the Ladder of Inference.

The same ‘Watch’, ‘Think’ and ‘Dig Deeper’ format applies to every TED-Ed video. I was glad when I found on TED-Ed Susan Cain’s The Power of Introverts, a talk I had watched on the TED website over a year ago. Different from the previous video, this one is not an animation, but a typical TED talk video that allows you to see the speaker’s face. It’s like a recap for me but with additional resources provided in “Dig Deeper.” I can’t wait for the weekend to come to explore further on this topic. Life is a journey of exploration, and exploration continues with TED-Ed.

Extrapetite.com

Since I started my job search in October 2012, as a girl from Asia, soon I learned of the difficulty in finding work clothes in the United States. I am 5'3'' tall and 115lbs, which is on average in terms of the size of Taiwanese girls. However, in the U.S., I look so small, and the clothes in most of the stores are too big for me.

People around me suggested I should look for "Petite" clothes. According to Wikipedia, a petite size is a standard clothing size designed to fit women of shorter height, typically 160cm (5 ft 3 in) or less.

Being a frugal shopper, I started with discount stores such as T.J.Maxx, Marshalls, and Ross. I used to be able to find clothes in my size in these stores when I was looking for casual wears. However, I encountered barriers when looking for professional wears, both suits and business casual. Sometime it was the pants that were too loose and long, sometimes it was the tops with shoulder width being too wide for me.

And then some local Asian friends suggested I check out Banana Republic, Loft, and Ann Taylor. I could easily find my size in these stores, but again as a frugal shopper, they looked so expensive. Since I landed a job, I had been wearing a few clothes I bought from these stores with discounted prices at an outlet, along with many other cheap clothes in wrong size that I bought from places like T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, and Ross. Soon I realized that I did not feel confident at all when wearing those clothes that were in the wrong size, and gradually I just stuck to the only clothes that look fit on me. Given the limited number of clothes, I reached out to the Internet to learn how to match different pieces of clothes to create variety but still look professional.

Then I found this website (http://www.extrapetite.com/) run by an Asian Petite named Jean. She is 5 feet tall and 94 pounds, living in Boston. Apparently she was struggling finding professional wears but later on she learned where to shop for clothes and how to match up different pieces to look good. In addition, she also shares some DIY tips and brands that petites might be interested in trying. I have been enjoying reading her blog and was inspired by her that instead of owning many cheap clothes with wrong size, owning a few good quality clothes with right size might be a better option.

Toastmaster - Speech contest

Leave the Comfort Zone

- August 9, 2011 -

I’d like to think about a moment when you felt you were growing up. When I was in my sophomore year, my favorite professor Dr. Guo said: only when leaving the comfort zone can a person really grow up. The so-called leaving your comfort zone means leaving your family, the friends you are familiar with, and the environment you grew up. Therefore, I made up my mind to study abroad after college.

When I was in my senior year, one day I went to a finance professor, Dr. Li's office to ask for advice for schools in the U.S. He gave me a list of all the top schools in the U.S. such as Harvard, NYU, University of Pennsylvania, and so on. The next day I received an email from that professor. A friend of Dr. Li, named Dr. Chow is a finance professor at West Virginia University. He was seeking two students at Dr. Li's department to his new program of master in finance with full tuition waiver. "Studying abroad experience for free!" sounds appealing. I went to interview with Dr. Chow when he went on a trip to Taiwan, took graduate school test GMAT and English test toefl, signing up a language exchange partner to improve my English, and went to Tainan, the city with all good Taiwanese food the day before I left Taiwan to the U.S.

I landed in the U.S. in a small college town called Morgantown, West Virginia two years ago. Everything was exotic, and my English was so poor. Walking on the street, a lady friendly greeted me, saying "how are you doing?" I said, "what?" and got closer. "How are you doing?" I said "what?" and got even closer. "I said How are you doing?" I finally realized and said, "I'm good." and then went to a grocery store shopping, same scene happened again. After three days, I learned that if the only sentence I need to know survive on the street is: “I’m good.”

Not only my listening, but my English speaking was poor as well. I did not know the difference in the pronunciation of Pepper and Paper, Chef and shave. I was anxiously looking for ways to involve myself in the English environment, including hanging out with my host family, signing up a conversation partner, and going to the gym. It did not take me too long to figure out there’s a gym on campus offering free workout classes and personal trainers. I went to every single class to learn the vocabularies of exercise, and signed up a personal trainer to make sure there was at least one person in that gym that I could speak English with. Let alone the English practice part, I was completely into the workout itself. I ended up settling down in a Karate class as the only student, kicking and punching for an year with a teacher who did not talk too much. So now, I really doubt if you can tell the difference when I say chef and shave….

After graduation from West Virginia University last August, as a master in Finance, I moved to Atlanta, and ended the long-distance period in my relationship with my boyfriend. He is here in the audience today. I had a hard time finding a job as a foreigner, and I ended up being a office administrator at Huawei Technologies, a Chinese company which is going to take over the U.S. I mean, their news appeared in Wall Street Journal so often during a period of time that my American friends were always joking about it, although they do not even know how to pronounce the name correctly…..You say…you work for Huawei, huwei, huwaii technologies….?

Although this position is not on my career path. In the past six months working at this position, I learned how it looks like to work at a big company. Also, I saved money to sign up for the Chartered Financial Analyst exam level II, and practice English speaking with my American coworkers and vendors. The result of the exam was just announced last week and I passed, but there is still room for the improvement of my English speaking. That is what brought me to Toastmasters club. I would appreciate it if you guys are strict to my speaking, my pronunciation, and grammar. So our grammarian, you know how important your role is.

Thanks to Dr. Guo, I really grew up in the past two years in the U.S., at least my muscles are growing. Don't feel depressed when you encounter frustration. Recall Dr. Guo's saying," only when leaving the comfort zone can a person really grow up." You are actually growing up when there's headwind coming to you.