Sleepless in Seattle:         Network, Network, Network

How time flies… I’m in my 5^th week of the internship and I try to network as much as possible. I Network with people in my team, in my division, in my company and with other MBA’s. Most of the network is done through lunch meetings and coffee breaks – you probably know what I’m talking about. Although it is pretty easy to stay in my room, crunching presentations and data to provide some sort of useful output to my group I prefer to fill-up my day with meetings – and my nights with the crunching and reading and processing the data.

My networking can be divided into 3 types. The first is the most important one – the internal division network. I am engaging in meetings and casual conversations with people from my own group and division to learn about them and their day2day work. To understand how they could help me with my project, what is it like to work with and around them and just to enjoy the company of very smart and fun people. The second kind is the future type – I try to meet with people from different divisions and different roles in the company to understand how the big picture comes together, to see the vision of other people in different positions around the company. The third type is the MBA connection – I try to attend all the organized events that the Microsoft recruiters sponsor and the unofficial ones also.

But more than everything I try to manage time to be with my family. I haven’t seen them for 4 weeks and my entire first MBA year was mainly around recruiting and networking, so the time I spent with my wife and kids was pretty limited. I can’t say I have much more time now but it is much better than before. So most of the days I try to be home around 19:00-20:00 be with my kids for couple of hours and back to some work around 23:00.

                                                                                                                Till next time,

                                                                                                                                Barak

Exciting first week

It has been a very busy but fruitful week! I started by flying to Atlanta for my 1st stage - 3 days training. I am very excited to find that we have interns from almost all 50 states of US. There are several Rossers in the crowd.

We had a series of workshops led by experts to introduce the company culture and some methodologies and tools that could apply to work. We were divided to different groups to simulate the real consulting team to solve a business problem. This exercise gave us a general idea of consulting and also prepared us with some basic steps to approach problems. After the training at the second day, we had a great networking and dinner event with some partners.

We finished the first stage training at the third day, and then I flied to my home office – San Francisco for my second stage training. San Francisco is a very beautiful city, built on mountains and besides the Pacific Ocean. I really like the weather here. It is a bit cool but very refreshing.  Its public transportation is very convenient. I commute to the city by taking BART (like subway).

I am very glad to find that I was assigned with a peer advisor who just joined the firm about one year ago. He could help me with any problem I may have during my day to day job. I also have a counselor, who is a senior level person in the firm and he can help me to plan my career path in the firm and point out direction for me. Most importantly, he will be the person evaluate me in the end of the internship.

The Last day of the training is a community event. This year we went to a charity organization to do some volunteer works.

2 weeks in NYC and counting!

It's crazy how fast time goes by in New York City. I've been here for 2 weeks now, and I have not had a day when I have nothing to do. I came here 2 weeks ago, and spent everyday of the first week learning to get around the city, find places to buy groceries, etc. Going from Michigan to Manhattan, I was really overwhelmed by the amount of people I see everyday, and I'm still not used to getting stuck in a crowd almost all the time. Interestingly, just by walking around the city, I've bumped into classmates from Michigan - glad to see that many Michigan students are having great internships in the city! After a week, I still did not get to see even half of the city. But at least I know where I can go to get what I need :)

This week was training week for my internship. It was an intensive 5 day training of accounting, finance and learning how to use the databases that I will be using at work. I got to meet a good number of the people in the intern class, made some friends that I will hopefully be touch with, and got to see the floor I will be working at. I will be working with equity capital markets group this summer, and so far, I've only met my supervisors. They are really nice and have promised that we will be getting a great learning experience. I've also met the 5 other interns allocated to the group, and everyone seems to be bonding well and have plans to get together outside of work. I will be starting at my desk this Monday and because of the nature of my group, I actually have to get into work at 7am everyday, but I may actually get out at 7pm. That is actually not typical of investment banking, as many of you may know that bankers typically work till 12am or even pull all nighters. That said, it remains to be seen if I actually get off earlier. Overall, I'm really excited to get on the team this Monday and to meet everyone on the team.

Mind the gap.

Doing your internship in a field you are familiar with is both a blessing and a curse. You can dive right in, only to find yourself knee-high in research before you even know the name of the co-worker in the cube next to yours. You are relieved to know you are high on the learning curve, but you question whether it would not have been better for you to experience something completely new. You are confident you know the material, the industry, the products and the market, but you doubt your ability to bring completely fresh insights to the table. You can rush to catch the fastest train to Deliverable Street station, but you constantly have to mind the gap: what might I be missing that the executives already know, or that another fresh, bright MBA intern would not miss?

Because a summer internship is a little like the metro system at rush hour: you scurry your way through a crowd of people that you should really stop to talk to for a bit rather than hurry to the next stop, and you do not want to surface before it is truly time. Some people seem to get tempted to work so hard on achieving strong deliverables, that it almost beats the purpose.

Everyone will tell you to enjoy this experience. Everyone will also tell you to make the best of it. Everyone is right and no one is able to tell you how to do those things. It is up to you to figure it out.

I love unwinding in Austin. This town has a great mix of indoors and outdoors fun. It is already close to 100 F. in mid-day, but I am able to enjoy it nonetheless so far. At least for this summer, I can think of no other place where I'd rather be.

Hello Seattle!

Hey there!

Its good to be back here on the blog. The last two weeks have just flown by. I got to Seattle on the 1st

(remember I told you in my first post that I will be interning at Microsoft this summer), so yeah, got here, and drove directly to the apartments that Microsoft ("MS") arranged for us. And lo and behold!- these apartments are bang in the middle of downtown Seattle, just minutes away from the famous Pike Place Market and the beautiful harbor!!!

The weekend was inconsequential as I bought the basics to settle into my fully furnished service apartment. and then the week began....
Monday was orientation day (called NEO- New Employee Orientation) at MS where about a 100-200 full time employees, about 500-600 undergrad interns and 20 MBA interns started their journey at MS. Yes, we later found out that MS received 3000 MBA applications for internships, they interviewed 892 applicants and finally 60 of us made it through- I feel honored to be part of this extremely smart group of individuals. So the class of interns at MS was a good mix from the top 10 schools- but one thing was common among all of us- I found every one of my peers extremely down-to-earth and amicable. And that made so much sense when I met the MS team that I will be working with during the summer.

People at MS are like that- brilliant and modest. They like to have fun even as they work really hard and every five minutes I hear people cracking up into laughter in the corridor outside my office. So on Tuesday, I was introduced to my team in the Microsoft Office Division and I felt very much a part of this team very quickly. My mentor introduced me to all the members of the 8-member team and briefed me on the details of the project. My summer project is about the transition of MS's customers in the business productivity space to cloud computing- yes- its looking at the existing and future strategy for the  exciting new Office 365!!!! This is an exciting time in Redmond, as Microsoft prepares to compete with Google in the area of cloud computing.

As I began working on my project, I realized two very important things that I learned at Ross, which I am applying directly to my project-
1) The way I look at problems has become so much more structured
2) Complexity and overload of information doesn't seem to bother me anymore (especially after those strategy cases which every Rosser will agree were info overloads!), enabling me to filter the more important pieces of information and focusing on those.

Outside of the project work, my team members (both senior and junior) had taken me out to lunch and on tours of the Microsoft Commons (they have awesome food and shops- even a massage parlor and salon!) on three out of the four working days I have been here. So far, I'm loving this casual environment- yes! I'm wearing jeans and t-shirts to work everyday!!!!!!!!!!!!!...some more !!!!! It's a big change from NYC and I'm loving it! Now off to tour the Pike place market and enjoy the Seattle downtown! Will be back with some more news next time..Chao!

More than just work

It has been more than a month since I started my internship in Lear Corporation. I have learned a lot during work and enjoyed working with my coworkers. They are all quite humorous. The social life here is quite enjoyable. 

Every week we try to schedule a lunch to gather all the employees in the office together. Although probably not everyone attends the lunch, we can still have about ten people every time. The lunch gives us a chance to communicate with each other and learn about what is going on in the other departments. 

Cute cat from the animal shelter

What I like most here is that we have a “Casual Friday” rule. Every Friday we can wear jeans and T-shirts, which requires us to donate at least one dollar every time to an organization that changes every month. Last month we donated about 200 dollars to the Animal Shelter in Taylor. Some coworkers and I visited the animal shelter when the HR person sent the money there.  The cats and dogs there were all adorable. Also they need more volunteers to be there, so we decided that we would help there sometime this month to walk the dogs. 

Besides, Kim from the HR department has worked on getting discounts for us to go to the gym nearby. She has got us a great deal. It’s only a $10 dollar sign-up fee and $5 monthly fee for us to go to the gym nearby. It is kind of hard for me to maintain going to the gym, but I am trying to go there at least once every week during lunch time with my colleagues. I definitely need more exercise.

In all, I am enjoying myself right now. The social life in Lear gives me a lot of fun and I am glad to work with my colleagues.