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by Louie Shearon

I had almost no idea what to expect when it came to the workload of this program. When I talked with Jon Agnew about the program months before I came here, he told me it would be the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life. I tried to keep a straight face. I think I pulled it off in the moment but the reason I almost laughed was that I am no ordinary 20 year old college student.

For the last two and a half years, I have worked at Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers. It’s a fast food restaurant chain back in Minnesota. This Raising Cane’s happens to be the very best performing restaurant of well over 300 restaurants. Needless to say, they put me to WORK when I started working there three years ago. This past summer, I regularly clocked in 65 hours a week. Sometimes I’d go easy on myself and only work 50-ish hours.

I suppose the weird thing about me is I just hate sitting around. I love having things to do and a goal to work towards. If I don’t have any work, I make more and that’s why I’ve loved class here at WMI. So far with the WMI classes, we have to make a website, video, and written work every single week. You don’t have to have a disturbing love for hard work to succeed here, but you really cannot afford to be afraid of working hard either. If everyone who was afraid of hard work didn’t push themselves, no one would ever achieve anything great.

VIDEOS:

The videos are probably the hardest part of our weekly assignments for a number of reasons. We get the video assignment on Friday, and since all of us are interning Monday-Thursday, it’s pretty difficult to film anything at night any of those weeks due to it being dark outside. It’s possible your video could take place inside, but then you have lighting, voice echoes, and other issues. So, when you get the assignment on Friday, you really want to have a solid idea of what your video is going to be by the time Sunday morning rolls around. I have a hard time rushing my inspiration because a really great idea that you can’t wait to get started on is hard to come up with in a little over 24 hours. I feel like I am an endless spring of creativity but I have this weird fear that it will just run out during this program. It’s going great so far so luckily I don’t think my fear is justified.

WRITING & WEBSITE:

What we write ends up as the content on the website, but it can be pretty overwhelming at times. The hard part is essentially planning out a makeshift business every single week, but the work definitely gets easier as you see how much content you really are capable of creating. The work is fun for me, and I love checking things off my list. The biggest thing I do that helps me is always starting my project on Sunday, so I can hopefully avoid pulling an all-nighter Thursday night.

The mantra of us at Raising Cane’s in Minnesota is “Let’s go to work.” No matter how huge the pile of work I have in front of me, I just say to myself, “Alright Louie, let’s go to work.” That’s the best way to summarize this program so far: let’s go to work.