Blog 14: Independent Component 1

• Literal

(a) "I, Gabriel Marquez, affirm that I completed my independent component which represents 31 hours of work."

(b) The sources I used for my independent component is doing more mentorship with Jason Cox, who is now my current mentor.

(c) Look at Mentorship Hours link on my blog.

(d) While doing my independent component with Jason, he continued to show me the basics of running the store (JPM Comics) from where my first mentor, Kevin Mitchell, left off before he left due to foot injuries. I have learned a lot more about the basics of the store and the even learning the tips and secrets to use when using the register or to restocking the shelfs. I had even met the owner of the store, Pierre, and he has been very helpful and supportive when it comes to my senior project. I am learning currently on how to close the store since I stay until closing time (7 pm) and have opened the store once (opening time is 12 pm) and opening the store is a lot faster then closing it. I hope to learn soon on how to order comics and other merchandise and learn to use our database better because I do have some information on how to it, but not that much hands on experience. It also helped me a lot to get to know most of the regular customers that go in every week. We have built rather friendly relationships to one another which is very important to do when working at a store that involves retail.

• Interpretive

As you can tell, this is a picture from inside of the store.

This is the "front desk" of JPM Comics where I actually sit most of the time because I work the register a lot of the time I am there. As you can see by the register, it is my first mentor Kevin before he left. (In the red shirt)

JPM Comics also sell "statues" (as seen above) and action figures/toys. Unfortunately, I do not get to sell much of the statues or any of the toys since we rarely get people wanting to buy them and since they can be very expensive.

• Applied

By doing more mentorship hours with Jason, he helped me get another point of view of the way things are run from what Kevin thought. I could use both sides of information and put them together so I can get the best knowledge of what I am doing. What both Kevin and Jason did to help me out was for me to work register as one of my main jobs to actually experience talking and interacting with the customers and engage into conversations. This helped me with one of my answers "Get to know your customers" because they aloud me to have the very helpful experience. Another thing that is very helpful is that they let me take comics of the shelves and read them and just put them back. This is a way to keep up with popular titles (Spider-Man, Batman, etc.) and to let the customers know my feedback and recommendation on what to read or not. This would fall under my answer "Knowing your products."