First week in IBM GBS

The first one and half week of my internship has passed by quickly, and I have received my first paycheck this morning, which is my first one after I quitted my job in China one year ago!

I started my three-day orientation and training with other 40 interns, including both MBAs and undergraduates, in Herndon, Virginia, which is a nice city near Washington DC Dulles international airport. It is really nice to know all of the interns, and I talked with almost everyone and made quite a few new friends from different MBA programs and universities all over the U.S. Actually, what impressed me most is the diversity of the intern class; people are originally from all over the world with different academic and professional background. But one thing in common, all of us are passionate about consulting, especially information technology oriented strategy consulting. So our conversation topics are mostly around the unknown consultant life ahead of us in near future.

All of the interns were recruited by IBM Global Business Service and will be based in either New York or Chicago office during the summer. In IBM GBS commercial sector, consultants are aligned with different industrial sectors, including financial services, distribution, communications, industrial, general business and internal practice. Each of these sectors is an independent P/L, consisting of Strategy transformation, business analytics optimization and SAP and oracle application practice. As I mentioned in my previous post, I am aligned with strategy and transformation practice within Industrial Sector for the summer.

I spent most of time in the first week studying industrial sectors’ learning material, and more importantly, familiarizing myself with all kinds of administration tools within IBM. Although I had sort of expected the complexity of the administration system of IBM since it is such a huge company, I was still surprised after a glimpse of how this ‘elephant’ company is actually run. At the end of last week, I finally got to know my project assignment and I will probably travel to client site starting from the mid of next week. I will come back with new stories about my internship in 2 weeks. Good luck to everyone!

Week One

Only a week of the internship at Merrill has gone by....9 more weeks to go! I was busy the first three days of last week with an orientation required for all interns. There were students there who will be working all over the country (the networking skills that Ross has ingrained in me definitely came in handy). To be honest, it was kinda dry but that's neither here nor there. After the orientation, on Thursday, I had the pleasure of meeting the actual people I will be working with this summer. My manager's name is Rich and I work with two guys named Alex and Rafael. They are actually all pretty cool and I feel like we are developing a great relationship. I work on a huge sales desk. There are no cubicles in the office, just one big open space where everyone sits....kinda cool. My particular group works with concentrated equity. Our job is to create different structured products around this equity that are tailored to a clients specific needs. For example, a client may want to hedge against downside market risk. We can create a specialized product using derivatives to help him/her do this. In effect, our clients are actually financial advisors who have clients with large equity holdings. I am in the learning process right now, trying to figure out the ins and the outs of this business. It is interesting to me and I intend to ask a lot of questions! My office is located in the World Financial Center right on the Hudson River. When I look out the window, I see the Hudson on one side and the World Trade Center construction  on the other. The other day, I decided to walk home. It was absolutely beautiful walking along the river and looking at the water and New Jersey City on the other side. I walked all the way back to my cozy NYU dorm. With two roommates, one being a Ross student, we are packed into one room. It's cozy though and I am enjoying myself. Other than that, NYC is a crazy place, from the high roller night clubs to the underground subways. But I love it all. It's a great city with a lot of opportunity waiting to be taken. That's all for now, talk to you guys soon!

1.2 Week at Eli Lilly

(MBA, Eli Lilly) Time flies so fast before I realized it. After helping the nice sponsor identify and validate the most reasonable acquisition strategy in MAP, I flew to Yellowstone National Park with friends and drove over 6 hours in the park every day for a week. The scenic view is really amazing and phenomenal. Bisons, Elks, Bears, and the geysers...
It seems like a nonstop journey for me after that. I flew back to Ann Arbor in the afternoon on May 16 and drove another 5 hours down to Indianapolis on May 17. The next day, I got up at 6 am and it took me a while to find the right way to the building where we were going to have the orientation. The first interesting I found about Lilly is that the streets in their campus cannot be located by GPS.
But the decoration in the building is pretty impressive. And, the orientation took half of the day, going through company culture, code of conduct, logistics and etc. During the orientation, the interns had chance to chat with each other. I came to know some interns with very interesting background. In the afternoon, my internship supervisor came into the lecture hall and picked up me.
At first glance, she had no smile on her face. A little bit seriousness to me though. But I tried to crack the iceberg and found some topics to schmooze with her. It did not work well but at least made me less embarrassed. So the US office culture is going to be the first lesson to learn here!
My supervisor walked me around the office and introduced me to Treasury team. People are nice to me. Then we set down to discuss my internship project. The project is to help Lilly Treasury build a new tool which is used to assess the trade credit risk of its customers and calculate the credit limit accordingly. This is related to all affiliates in the world. Obviously, she has set a pretty high expectation on me.
So far, I am clear about what I am going to deliver at the end of the day and leveraging sources, i.e. talk to process owners to understand current situation and seek their advice on the project. Meanwhile, I have to read through many documents to understand the credit policy and the change the team would like to vision in the near future. It is a bit challenging for me because it is my first time to work in a US office environment – the etiquette, the small talks, unwritten rules and jargons and so on are pretty new to me. Thus, I have to deepen my learning curve quickly to catch up with the fast-passing timeline. Lots of things to do, lots of fun to have but definitely hard work is the pre-requisite.
Indianapolis is a nice city, bigger than Ann Arbor. I had no time to wander around in downtown but plan to explore the area later. Also, Indy 500 is coming at the corner. There are going to be a lot of roaring at this weekend. I would be very excited to see the match then!