Fun Seeking

It is a little akward for me to live in a very small town in mid-west US as I was born and raised up in a city with 10 million people. In order to be not so boring after work or during weekends, fun seeking became a very important factor to keep live sustainable.

The good thing in summer is that a lot of interns around the same age do live in the town, you can either organize event or join event to know the people, thus enlarge your social circle. Last week, a birthday party was hosted at my place, although it was not my birthday. More than 15 people showed up and we definitely had a great time. Chinese food was prepared by a friend's parents and drinks were plenty. I love the sweet and sour rib. BE CAREFUL, this is not the sweet and sour thing at Chinese restaurant in US, this is REAL Shanghai family style sweet and sour rib. For the desert, I like the "OREO meatball". It was prepared by an undergraduate intern and he had to smash the OREO biscuit by hand. I wondered if his hand was clean enough to make it. But it tasted good!

Besides those events, I joined some sports game just to keep myself healthy, especially when I noticed that I am in my 30s. Playing basketball with younger folks is not a easy job, considering I am a non-atheletic Chinese. During weekend, I drove to Indy for hanging out with folks who are smarter as they decided to live in a real city. There are definitely plenty of restaurants and bars on the massachusette avenue in Indy. Being socially inactive for the first year of my MBA program, I certainly should know more people so that I can know a little more about everything.

Season 3: Beyond work

(MBA, Eli Lilly) Beyond daily work, we have world cup. :D

The world cup is definitely a popular topic in Lilly. When you have a talk with Lilly employees, it is easy to open the conversation by starting to discuss on how USA team can beat the rivalry teams.

Besides daily work, Lilly HR encourages us to reach out people from different departments. I usually schedule two meetings with different people in the same day and learn their daily job and department. I think it is a great opportunity for me to go outside my silo and understand what is going on in every corner of the corporate. Talking to 30 people during the internship is my goal. During these meetings, I find most people from Lilly are easy to approach and willing to share their experiences and offer advice. The most benefit from networking with them is to open your eyes to their worlds, for example, you can appreciate what is their urgency now, what is the challenge they are facing, what keeps them staying with Lilly for over 30 years, so on and so on.

I often invite people to go lunch together or grab a coffee in the afternoon. Especially, on Friday, that tactics works much better. People are more than happy to meet you and talk more on Friday. In addition, Lilly also organizes many intern events to broaden our networking with senior leaders. During these events, you will have opportunity to talk to the executive vice presents and listen to their unique experiences with Lilly. This gives us more flavors about the life in Lilly.

The daily workload is a bit heavy for my project because this project is tied to a bigger urgent project conducting by the team. The typical day is like this: 6:30am get up. 6:40am breakfast and read WSJ news on iphone. 7:30am drive to Lilly Corporate Center. 8am check and answer yesterday’s emails and set up today’s to do list. 9am-12am focus on project taks. 12am-1pm, go lunch with some interns or with Lilly colleages. Stir fried pasta and Taco salad are my favorite. 1-2pm back to back meet and talk with people from different departments. 3-6pm continue to work on the projects and attend related business meetings.

The project is close to the end, and hopefully I can add some value to the team by coming up with new solutions to their current issues.