So it begins!

I found out I couldn’t sleep well at night on Sunday. In my excitement at commencing the first day of the summer internship program, I fell out of bed at about 6:00 AM (after turning in at around 1:30 AM) and proceeded to get ready for the day. Prior to this I’d developed some pet peeves with the on-boarding process, the biggest one being that I’d had to complete seemingly identical forms, in different media (i.e. online and print) and at different points in time. However my frustrations were ameliorated by the fact that the HR reps are super nice.

The first day of orientation began with a general breakfast for all MBA Interns after which we broke out into different rooms for the training. The first day of training turned out to be a bit anti-climactic as our day ended at about 5:30 PM – not quite in line with the long hours of work and intensely cerebral debates we’d all come to expect, though it’s a safe bet that the intensity would rise exponentially over the next day or so. We ended the work day with trips to our permanent desks and my impression of Citi as an atypically friendly investment bank was reinforced when so many different people stopped by our cubes to talk to us and offered to help answer any questions or make us comfortable. I hope this feeling/impression lasts throughout the summer (knocking on wood).

From the summer schedule, we learnt that we’d each be assigned individual research projects to be presented at the end of the summer (we’re yet to know what these are). We also have tons of “Speaker Series” sessions with key officers including Vikram Pandit, a golf outing day with some of the Managing Directors as well as the opportunity to attend a Mets game at the eponymous Citi Field – wouldn’t it be nice to sit in one of the platinum or club seats?

A census of the 31 MBA interns in the class of 2010 (apparently the smallest class in recent times) revealed an interesting and impressive fact: Ross – with 5 students - has the biggest representation amongst the business schools. Another cool thing about the first day is the high level of camaraderie displayed by the summer associate class. Individuals who’d never met before promptly bonded and broke into spontaneous interactions that belied any notions of rivalry that may be expected from people vying for limited full-time offers. We had quality discussions at breakfast, saw a world cup soccer match as a group over an extended lunch and capped the day with drinks at a local watering hole - “Puffy’s Bar”. I’d say that was a pretty auspicious day one.