My Earth Shaking Experience Abroad: Costa Rica
- 07
- Jun
So I can finally say I have experienced my first Earthquake while in San Jose, Costa Rica on a business trip. Who would have thought? So this is posting while I am either still in Vancouver, BC for the NAFSA Anual Conference or recovering. I hope to see a lot of you guys there! Come by the EducationUSA booth and say hello! I think every trip I take for work it gets better and better. I really am starting to get into the groove with networking and getting to know our advisers and meeting new people. Like I said earlier it is not something I am great at doing but I think every event I get more and more opened to talking to people I don’t know.
The food was amazing everywhere I went and I have to say it was one heck of a bi-national center in Costa Rica. I also was met with one of the best parts of my job when I get copies of things I designed. Since I design everything in DC and it is printed locally for centers I don’t get to see slot of the final products. While I’m on that point I want to touch on a little project I started under a year ago. So in an effort to streamline my workflow a bit and dealing with so many different people, I created a ticket system and it just surpassed 400 jobs. Ok, let’s take a step back. Each ticket is at least one request (some are more then one) that could anything from a flyer to a book, or a DVD or 100 certificates.
Ok, so the ticket system was probably an AMAZING idea I came up with when I had one of my moments. I’ve had a lot of those lately and have been coming up with tons of new ideas and things to keep me busy. One thing that trickled down from the state department was 805 compliance for media on our website at work and integration of HTML5 so that the videos work on iOS devices. Ok, so I have a off and on case of insomnia and work usually benefits from it. One of these sleepless nights I decided to spend my time coding and the next working walked into the office with video playing on our website on my iPad.
Now that I’m on video I thought I would talk a little about the backend platform we are using. A while ago we started using Brightcove as our video players and it have been getting better with time. As someone who is not a huge coder I have gotten used to the BEML framework in building players. It is structured a lot like XML and there are plenty of resources that I could work from. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make it to PLAY, their developers conference but it is something that I would make if it doesn’t clash with NAFSA or the Forum next year. I think the best part was seeing them use our website in their presentation on best practices, and it doesn’t hurt that our site works and state.gov doesn’t (at the. Time of writing this post).
This summer I will be taking on BEML and the Brightcove framework to build up video pages for EducationUSA.info and hope to have them polished and working by the fall. Like most big ideas like this it is something I am doing in my “spare time”.
Ok, got way off topic, scatter brained, I know. Costa Rica. I went through some of my old presentations on podcasting and radio and obviously the training for how to submit tickets (aka, send me work) but I also got to do a few new ones. I hope everyone was sincere with their positive feedback, and I’m sure they were, but I think my sessions went swimmingly!
I did a new session on photo basics as an art, going beyond the photo (more about how to use photos to show emotion and tell a story, and more importantly how to use them to sell EducationUSA as a network) and a re-tooled video presentation which actually went more towards marketing and commercials to help sell their centers to students.
It was one of those time where I felt that I was just motoring along and hardly ever look at the PowerPoint. I just naturally advanced them as I talked and when I did look to make sure I didn’t miss anything I realized I had covered everything and then some. It was a nice feeling to have for someone that is still not used to public speaking and really used to hate it.
When I talk tech, or video or photography, it’s just natural. I used to tell people I could BS a paper on anything as long as it had to do with media or tech. For example, I took a writing about film class in college. Our assignments were two pages a night on the film we saw that day. Could have written 10 and gone into so much detail my prof would have told me to shut up and let someone else have a chance while in class.
To wrap up, once again, another great group of advisers and new friends to keep up with. And I even decided to start up a group for everyone I meet up with in our adviser network. The running joke is that I “Brandon-ize” aka design EducationUSA. I used to joke that I was going to start a fan club for myself, I guess in a way I did. It will prove interesting how everyone will grow into it and I plan on constantly adding content to it and try driving conversation. It also gives me an outlet to ask advisers for things like photos from their regions or inform them about the great stuff I might have planed for them down the road.