Project goes on

It’s hard to believe that it’s been over two weeks now since my last blog. So what’s been happening with my internship and life in Ann Arbor? There’s a lot, both at and off work. As I mentioned previously, I was heavily involved in a project, trying to set up a new operation center in Danville, IL. This new center is the product of the home affordability refinance program as part of US governments’ efforts to help home owners with their mortgage payments. Because of forecasted popularity and big increase in customers’ responses, the Bank decided to recruit more than 170 new staff in order to handle the workload. My colleague and I, however, expressed our concerns about the prospect of finding so many people locally at managers’ conference meeting because of very limited size of the talent pool. Our concerns were shared by other senior managers too. As a result of that, we decided to expand our recruiting area to Champaign, IL that is about 40 miles away from Danville. As the project’s getting bigger and more complicated, several departments, including offices in Dallas, St Louise, HR and IT are working very closely to ensure the success of the new office. I will go on a road trip again later this week to provide support and assistance needed in Danville. So how’s Danville? Some might ask. Well, we couldn’t even find a nice restaurant to spend our daily meal allowance of $70 each in town. You can imagine the rest.

Despite the challenges and pressures that I have to deal with for this project, life outside work in Ann Arbor is pretty good actually in summer. I started to play tennis in the evenings and weekends with several new friends that I met in the local tennis club. I had BBQ party with some other MBA students who also happen to be in Ann Arbor in the summer. We went to the pub to watch the Eurocup final’s match between Spain and Italy on Sunday. So my summer here has been a really good experience so far and I am really enjoyed it.

Happy July 4^th everyone and I will update you again in two weeks.