Keep On Moving

I really enjoyed reading Kurt Timmermeister’s  Growing a Farmer . I didn't know much about farming at all, but his story has given me a better understanding of a farmer's life. After reading, I started to think about where my food is coming from and the ingredients of the food that I have every day. The most interesting part of the story was the chapter entitled “The Slaughter . ”   In this chapter, he describes his first experience of killing an animal that he has been taking care of. It felt so real that I was able to imagine the whole process and feel his struggle of the slaughter. Before reading this chapter, I did not know that he needs at least three other people for slaughtering pigs. As he listed in the book, it requires four types of tasks. These include the trigger-man, who will pull the trigger and kill the animal; the knife-boy, who will slit the throat of the animal; the blood-boy, who will catch the blood into a bowl; and the bung-boy, who will tie off...

Tax Intern Last fall, I was able to intern at BCWS, an accounting firm in Torrance, CA. I worked in the tax department. Though many people may find taxes a boring and repetitive affair, I found tax consulting to be a very interesting line of work. It was much more than simply filing individual and corporate tax returns. I am writing this memo to explain what a tax consultant does and what I did as a tax intern. What does a tax consultant do? A tax consultant typically expands on the role of the tax preparer. While tax consultants prepare tax returns, they also work closely with clients throughout the year to ensure that the client's tax liabilities are minimized. Some companies and individuals pay high taxes, i.e., as much as millions, to the government; these clients expect tax consultants to come out with effective tax strategies, year-end planning for an example, to lower their overall future tax bill. To do that, the tax consultant researches the latest tax laws and comm...

I really enjoy reading  Timmermeister's book, Growing a Farmer. His journey to becoming a farmer from living in Seattle with a secured job made me think of how brave he is. In terms of becoming a farmer, it is also what I personally want to do after retirement. Spending most of my life in a urban area, I felt myself somewhat disconnected to the natural. I miss the time when I was little, I went to my grandparents' backyard to harvest vegetables with my childhood friends.  One thing that really impressed me was that he never set a plan for doing things. Having a twin sister, I've always made decisions with her and made arrangements for plans with her in order to make less mistakes and avoid some conflicts. Therefore, I enjoyed reading about how he tried new things on a whim, how faced with problems by himself, and how to learned from mistakes. 

My name is Hailey Yuan and I consider myself as a Korean who was born and raised in Yanji, China, where about 65% of the population is Chinese and about 32% is Korean. Most of the Koreans in our hometown can speak both languages and have mixed culture. As for now, our family eat  Chinese dumplings o n New Year's Eve and my mom cooks Korean rice cake soup for us the next morning.  My ultimate goal is to be a Tax partner of an accounting firm and I wish it could be the firm where I will be working at after graduation called BCWS. I interned at this firm last semester. During my internship here, I have had a great chance to sit in on a client meeting with our two Tax partners regarding year-end tax planning. Of course, as a brand new intern, I wasn't able to join the conversation that much, but I learned many things like how they lead the meeting, how they answer client's questions, and so on. I found they were very technical and professional, and I realized that providing t...