Hello again!, as you may remember in my last post I told you all that I was coming to Columbus Indiana to start my internship at Cummins, a leading diesel engine manufacturing company. But well I'm here, actually I been here for a little more than a week. My first week at Columbus (and Cummins) has been interesting. I moved from Ann Arbor without more complication than missing an exit at the highway and making an extra 30 min drive. But when I arrived I discovered that I had neither TV nor Internet at my summer house!. So I decided to go out an know a little more of the city. There I found some nice restaurants, a couple of interesting buildings and an Ice Cream Parlor call Zaharakos that date from the early 1900's.
But well, let's leave the city stories for later and go into what is more interesting, my summer internship. As I told you in my first posting I'm intering at Corporate Strategy at Cummins. My first day wasn't very interesting, just a lot of HR stuff; policies of the company, paperwork, receive laptop, learn how to use e-mail (really… they gave us training on that). But later, at the second day, I finally came to the area were I'm working and I meet a lot of the people that I'll be working with during the summer. They all seem to be nice. That same day I also learned about the project… or more precisely, projects, I'll be working this summer.
I cannot tell what are they about, but they look interesting and a little challenging. What I can tell you all is that they are intented to analyze the potential entry to some new businesses. I don't know if any of you are used to work in a strategy project based environment, but this type of projects are usually very abstract and require that one can be comfortable with huge amounts of ambiguity, because usually nobody really knows what the project should be about. Imagine a conversation like this one:
- You: Hello
- Manager: Hello (put your name here), you know, we want to know what the opportunity is for the company in the banana business. Wanna do that project?
- You: Yes, I like bananas, what kind of bananas are we talking about?
- Manager: There are different kinds?! Well… I think we want to explore what bananas are interesting for the company...
- You: Great, any idea where do we want to sell bananas?
- Manager: That's also a good question... and I don't know if we want to sell bananas probably there are other options...
- You: Ok, I'll figure it out
After this conversation you go to your desktop, work for a couple of hours to figure out what "bananas", "participate" and "options" possibly mean and then you are ready to start working on an initial approach to your project… obviously the definitions will change as long as you develop the project and talk to more people… but well, that is the fun part, right?
Personally, I like working in this kind of environment because it has endless possibilities of what you can do and also usually have a very flexible scheme; you manage your time, resources, etc. So as you can imagine I'm happy with my summer assignments and I hope to deliver a quality result for Cummins and probably read about the fruits of my work it in the newspapers in the near future.
Well I think I should go back to work, those… "bananas" are not going to analyze themselves! Haha. See you soon!
Hilarious! Great post Edgar.
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