The Blurgh

Yesterday I did something that a few months ago would have seemed inconceivable–I got up at 7 am, printed out a slew of resumes, put on my one and only suit, and went to the job fair at the union.

At first, I was overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time.  Pretty much every meeting room on the 1st floor of the union was being used, and the rooms were practically busting at the seams with booths.  When you added the throngs of students that were there, the environment seemed like a hybrid between a convention and a street fair.

As I made the rounds, though, I started to get a bit discouraged.  There were a lot of interesting companies, but nothing really jumped out at me.  I talked to some people, got half a million pens and other goodies, but felt a little empty.  Around 11, I took a break and grabbed a seat in the lobby.

Since the job fair was being held in multiple rooms, each room had some sort of theme tying it together.  I first went into the psychology-related room, since, you know, I’m a psychology major and all, but all the employers in there were offering research or lab assistant type jobs that people look into when they’re interested in grad school.  Then I decided to look at the non-profit room, and although the booths there interested me more, I couldn’t find anything that seemed like a good fit.  It’s never good when your first impression of a job is that you could probably do it for 2 years but then be desperate to move on.

As I was sitting in the lobby, I took out the room guide and tried to figure out where I’d go next.  I knew the “Physical and Natural Sciences” room wouldn’t have anything for me, and although the “Public Service” room may have been interesting, I knew I wasn’t cut out for government work.  The last room was labeled simply as “Business,” so I figured I might as well check it out, and if nothing else, I’d probably get some good freebies.

When I went in, I quickly realized that what “Business” really meant was “stuff we don’t know how to categorize.”  There were your typical business booths (finance, marketing, retailers, etc.), but there were also a bunch of booths that seemed to span multiple categories.  One of those booths, I was pleased to see, was CRR.

I recognized the two people there as people who work in the outreach department, and they recognized me as well.  When they saw me, though, they gave me a weird look, and when I came over, they both asked, “What the hell are you doing here?”  Somewhat taken aback, I simply replied, “Uhhh, looking for a job…”

Well, as I found out, my manager had apparently asked all the CRR interns to become full-time employees after graduation, but it happened to be last Friday when I had to call off to take a test.  I hadn’t been scheduled to go back until tomorrow, so he was going to talk to me then.

I was stunned, but I couldn’t help but have a smile on my face for the rest of the day.  My manager called later in the day yesterday and officially offered me a job, and I enthusiastically accepted.  My internship has been awesome, and the work that CRR does interests me in so many ways.  So, come Monday May 1st, I will officially join the workforce!

Now I just have to make sure I get that graduation thing out of the way…finals are next week.

I’ve been writing about my internship at CRR for a while now, and it’s really been a tremendous experience thus far. Just this morning, though, I got the big news–we got the go-ahead to move forward with the Polish Hill project!

As I mentioned earlier on, this project was different than other projects CRR has pursued in the past. Not only was this project meant to implement neighborhood-wide improvements, but it also was designed to galvanize the community. A lot of the work I’ve been doing has been in that area–canvassing, meeting with neighbors, and trying to build support–and apparently it’s actually worked! I was looking over the final details of the plan, and it’s pretty ambitious:

• Conduct a neighborhood wide energy audit on buildings to identify structures which need better insulation or can benefit from other energy saving improvements, and then implement those improvements.

• Install locally manufactured solar panels on the sides of buildings and roofs that receive the most light (approximately 40 structures).

• Work with 10-20 home-owners and businesses to install water-reclamation systems

• Secure a parcel of land to be used as a community compost collection and distribution center, (which may also be turned into a biogas collector down the line)

• Assess the possibility of also building a medium-scale wind generator on that piece of land.

• Partner with a local biodiesel manufacturer to collect used frying oil from local businesses and homes and use it to create biodiesel, which will then be sold back to the neighborhood at a discount

• Provide general consultation to home and business owners on how to improve the energy-efficiency of their buildings.

The project is getting paid for by a number of sources, including the Polish Hill Neighborhood Association, city, state, and federal grants, and also from the home and business owners themselves. After-all, these improvements will save them money in the long run!

But more importantly, this is a huge project that neighbors are doing with and for each other. It never ceases to amaze me how tremendous and seemingly impossible things can get done when people come together and decide to make it happen.

For the past few months, I’ve been almost solely working on the community outreach portion of my internship at CRR. Last week I got a glimpse at another side, vendor outreach, and it’s a completely different animal.

The community side is a lot of canvasing, petitioning, meeting with people–things that any community organizer would be very familiar with. I’m not sure what to classify the vendor side as…maybe non-profit development work, or sales? In the scheme of things, it really is a very important part of the business. It involves meeting with businesses and manufacturers in the area, and sometimes outside, to pitch the mission of CRR and secure good prices on whatever it is that they sell and/or make, which can be anything from lumber to solar cells.

According to the folks that I’ve been working with, since CRR started 15 years ago there’s been a huge upswing of vendor’s and suppliers in Southwestern PA, especially for the more high-tech components. In the beginning, people were telling stories about how they were traveling across the country for the latest and greatest stuff to come out, but now it seems that the development of new ideas has caught up with the research in our own neck of the woods.

Today I’m going with some other CRR folks to see a local biodiesel producer who’s been around for almost 2 decades now. They’re someone that we’ve worked with before, so everyone is anticipating a smooth meeting, but I’m still a little nervous. I actually had to bust out some nice clothes, too, which also involved me having to remember how to tie a tie!

It’s that dreaded time of the semester again–midterms.  This time around it’s not too bad, but I am afraid that my biotech test is going to royally kick my butt.  There’s nothing like hoping everyone else in the class sucks at it as much as you do so that the curve will be enough to save you…it’s kind of like betting on who’ll lose a game instead of who’ll win it!

Otherwise, everything is going pretty well.  I had to tell CRR that I needed some extra time for studying last week, which they were cool about.  They’ve started hinting at some possibilities opening up after I graduate, which also makes me happy.  They’re good people and they do good work–it’s hard to get much better than that with an employer.

My directed study, though, has come to a bit of a roadblock.  We’ve done some interesting demographic research, which I’ll try to put up here sometime next week, and that shows some interesting trends.  What makes it hard, though, is trying to find a good measure of that nebulous thing we call “community.”  Some people have used things like fraternal organization membership and local sports clubs, but those plummet pretty much across the board nationally after the 1970s, even in places where there’s lots of “community,” so that doesn’t seem like it’ll provide a constant measure.

It’s also possible that what we call “community” has actually changed over the past hundred or so years.  Anyway, Dr. Lemley has a really good time thinking about this, but it’s starting to make my head spin.  Anyone out there have any ideas on the subject?  What does community mean to you?

This week, I’ve seen my first major triumph and first major defeat at CRR, and both of them happened within 24 hours of each other. If this is what life-after-school is really like, maybe I should start rethinking grad school…

A few days ago, I was out in Polish Hill with a couple CRR organizers, and we were making the rounds in the neighborhood trying to drum up support for the renovation project. Reaction has been mixed thus far, but we have been successful in getting a couple very enthusiastic supporters, so we were optimistic.

We came up to a door and rang the bell, and when the owner answered, we noticed that there were a dozen or so people in the living room. They were all home-owners who lived on that block, and they were having a meeting about different issues effecting them all like street conditions, snow plowing, etc. This was the perfect opportunity for us to make some good contacts, so went full-speed into talking about the project, and we were soon in the middle of the living room taking questions from a very engaged audience. By the time we left, we had a dozen names and numbers, commitments from several of them to speak with their neighbors, and a tremendously satisfying day. The next day, however, was nowhere near as smooth…

Besides canvassing, CRR does a lot of tabling and literature distribution. I’ve had some tabling experience before, and since everything’s been going so well, I was the lone person at a table setup outside one of the local businesses. We always get permission from the businesses before setting ourselves up, and often times businesses offer the space before we even ask because people tend to stop in the stores that we’re outside of.

Everything was going smoothly until a guy came up and started talking about how things would never change, and that a renovation project would never happen in Polish Hill. This was the first time I ever encountered any serious negativity, so I was a little taken aback. It seemed like this guy’s sole purpose in life was to be cynical and bring everyone else down with him, but I decided the best way to handle it was to counter any argument he came up with. He said it’ll never work, and I told him about neighborhoods where it did happen. He said that renewables will never be good enough, and I told him how solar cells these days are cheap and incredibly efficient, and so on.

This continued for over an hour.

At that point, the store owner came out and asked us both to leave. After the guy left, the owner apologized to me, but said that even though he supports us, he can’t allow incidents to happen outside his business. I packed up, and went back to the office.

Everyone there told me that this kind of stuff happens, and that you just have to get used to it. Although I know I shouldn’t have even tried to engage someone who was so obviously just a naysayer, I couldn’t help it. I really felt sorry for him. I personally feel like the definition of depression should be “the absence of hope,” and this guy made it obvious to everyone around him that he was majorly depressed. What he needed was some help; that kind of cynicism is a danger to himself and others.

I strongly feel that amazing things can happen when there’s hope, and when hope is coupled with ambition and opportunity, the world starts to change for the better. I’m just glad I work with people who feel the same way.

This internship is turning into a fascinating/mind-blowing/engrossing/eater of all available free time type of experience.  Let me elaborate…

The first few days there, my main duties were the office/go-for types of things that most internships are heavy on.  I did get to see a lot of the different things that CRR is involved with, and I noticed that everyone in the office was very busy and a little nervous about one particular new project in Polish Hill.  Being that I’m what others have termed “a nebshit,” I opened my big mouth and asked what I could do to help.  Ever since, my role at CRR has drastically changed.

If you’ve never been to Polish Hill, I’d highly recommend it–it’s a very interesting place.  It’s nestled between the Hill, Bloomfield, and the Strip in a very weird kind of way that only the hilly Pittsburgh topography can allow. Given its central location in the city, you’d think it’d be a busy area, but in a lot of ways it’s in its own little world.  There are some beautiful buildings and churches and a small strip of businesses, but other than that, it’s pretty much all residential.

In the past 20 years, significant development and revitalization has happened in most of the surrounding neighborhoods, but Polish Hill has mostly remained unchanged.  A group of about a dozen residents approached CRR about a month ago about doing a renovation project in the area, but the situation is a little different than CRR’s past projects.  In those, a well-established community organization has been in place beforehand, and they did a lot of the grassroots legwork necessary to get the renovation projects off the ground.  In this project, however, the 12 original individuals want to use this project to galvanize the community, and by the end not only have the renovations done but also have a community organization to get in on the development that’s going on all around them.

No one’s sure if it’ll work, but everyone’s excited about the possibility.  And since I opened my mouth, I’m now in the thick of it.  Between classes and my directed study (which I’ve been majorly slacking on!), I’m spending almost every free moment either in the office or out in the neighborhood going door-to-door trying to get support.  It’s cold and tiring, but also very exciting; I’ve never felt motivated like this before.  I just hope we get the project going, because I’d love to see how these things happen firsthand.

During my K-12 years, I was always given lines about how, “if you put your mind to it, you can do anything,” or, “if you do well in school, the doors will be open for you when you go out into the world.”  In the past few years, though, presumably as I’ve entered “the world” somewhat, those sentiments have been growing more and more hollow.

On one hand, I feel like I really should know what I want to do with my life.  Whenever adults (although I guess I’m an adult now, too) ask me about it, I feel like I want to go hide.  The truth is that I have no idea, and I’m not too proud of that.

And what’s with all the pressure, anyway?  I mean, I hear all the time about people totally changing their careers 3 or 4 times in their lives–did it help them to have an idea about what they wanted to do when they were younger, even though they turned out to be wrong?

Lately, whenever people ask me about my future plans, I’ve taken to giving the non-answer that’s cute when you’re younger: get taller.  For some reason, people don’t think it’s that cute now.  It is kind of true, though.  Whatever I end up doing, I want to learn and grow while I’m doing it.

So there!

I’ve finished my first few days at Community Recycling and Renewables (CRR), and so far I haven’t done much other than the usual get acquainted with things and random go-for duties. I have been learning a lot about the company, though, and since I’m a huge history dork I think it’s all very fascinating.

CRR is a small company, but you’d never guess it by the amount of work they do. It’s also a hybrid of sorts–it straddles the home improvement, community development, and renewable energy industries. It was started about 15 years ago by Bill Hollinger and Joanna Marcinovic, both of whom were recent grads of Pitt majoring in business. They got the idea when they were working in the labs of some prominent professors who were doing research on producing solar cells more efficiently. During their time there, the professors made a breakthrough, and shortly thereafter a few of them started out on their own manufacturing cells. It made big news in Pittsburgh, and it also got Bill and Joanna thinking.

At the time, renewable energy technology was getting more and more popular, but the application of it was focused primarily on large commercial and residential buildings. Since the cost of solar cells had come down a lot after the breakthrough, Bill and Joanna decided the time was ripe to make a transition into the home market. Both of them were also very handy and had a personal interest in home improvement, so their plan was to package home remodeling and renewable energy together. They got some help from the Office of Entrepreneurial Development at Pitt, and then took the plunge.

In the beginning, business was pretty slow. They did a few renovation projects for wealthy individuals which got a lot of press, but failed to generate a lot of business. Besides the lack of business, they also just felt like they weren’t making the impact that they wanted to make. They got into this to make money, but also to do some good for the environment.

They decided to take a chance and go speak at a meeting of one of the many community organizations in the city. It just so happened that the organization was debating ways that they could decrease their carbon footprint–they were sick of waiting for the government to take action. By the end of the meeting, they developed a plan for a neighborhood-wide renovation project that would incorporate recycling programs, education, and home renovations. They also found they were able to leverage some grant funds for the project, which brought the cost to the individual homeowners to a very manageable level. Thus, CRR was born.

Since then they’ve been involved with numerous projects in Pittsburgh neighborhood and surrounding communities. There are three main branches to their business: community outreach, vendor outreach and project implementation. I’m hoping to get a taste of each before the internship is over!

Since I’ll be starting an internship at Community Recycling and Renewables (CRR) in a few weeks, my days at the Castle are coming to an end.  It’s been awesome, and I’m going to miss the money a lot…I don’t know if you knew this, but there is quite a pay differential between bartending and interning!

It’ll actually work out all right, because starting in January, the Castle will be undergoing some renovation and expansion into the adjacent store.  Because of that, a large part of the bar will be unavailable, so they are cutting back on the number of people working every night.  I will miss it though, and I might try to start working there a few nights a week again after the semester’s over.  By then all the work will be done, so they’ll definitely be in need of people.

And I have to admit, I’m a little proud of myself–one of the main reasons that the owner decided to expand was to increase the capacity of the theatre and stage, and that’s largely due to the overwhelming success of the Rocky Horror night back on Halloween (my idea!).  The owner is planning on sponsoring an Indie movie night at least every week and also booking some bigger local bands as well as national acts to come play when the new and improved stage is done.

If you ask me, that’s something that Oakland desperately needs.  The South Side, Lawrenceville, the North Side and other neighborhoods already have big venues, but Oakland hasn’t had anything since Laga closed over 20 years ago (at least that’s what my Dad said).  He told me a story about sneaking in there to see P-Funk play when he was 16 or something…that must have been fun.

A few readers have pointed out to me that in my bio on the About Us page I mentioned participating in Pittsburgh Promise and doing a Pittsburgh Service Year, but I never elaborated on it in a post. With Pittsburgh Promise, there’s not a whole lot to tell–I went to Pittsburgh Public Schools and did well, so when I graduated I got a nice scholarship to cover part of my tuition at Pitt. It’s a great program, and one that made a big difference when my parents were planning their move back to Pittsburgh (or so they tell me).

There are a few more details, however, around getting involved with Pittsburgh Service Year. Like many kids who are nearing their final year or two of high school, I wasn’t sure whether or not I wanted to go to college. In fact, I think the only thing I was sure of was that I was sick of high school and couldn’t wait until I could legally drink. Oh those heady, idealistic times…

Just a few years before that, a number of organizations came together to create a program called Pittsburgh Service Year, which was modeled after other programs like City Year. It was a program for anyone between the ages of 18-24 who was interested in spending a year volunteering at local non-profits, hospitals, schools, or, later, for specific projects sponsored by the city. The program would pay a small stipend to the participant to cover living costs (very MODEST living costs), and after the year was up, there would be a bright shining star to put on a college application or resume.

Anyway, they were doing some tabling in the lunchroom of my school, so I decided to stop and look at the information they had. I asked the person about about the different areas I could volunteer in, which were the popular ones, which were the hardest, blah blah blah. Nothing caught my attention until she told me about a new project coming up sponsored by the city which involved working with the Public Works department. For some reason it seemed really interesting, so I decided to apply right then and there. That was no doubt one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life thus far.

I learned so much that year about all kinds of things, some of them practical, some ridiculous. For example, I could tell you all about the many “paper streets” in the South Side, including when they were first built and why. I can also tell you that I never, ever want anything to do with animal control. Most importantly, though, I learned that Pittsburgh is made up of many different communities, each with its own unique character, but that they are all filled with some of the best people I’ve ever met.

In retrospect, I think going through that program is what made me really want to study history. I’m still very close friends with a lot of the people I met there, and I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.