Hello, Hello.

Hello working world, hello senior year. After this summer, I feel better prepared going into my senior year with confidence and knowledge that no one else will have. I know I’ll be ready to jump right into the working world and hit the ground running. I think you can all read into my internship experiences my reading my other blogs but I’ll take this time to talk about the benefit of our regional project and why it makes me feel so good about saying ‘hello’.

The SalesForce project gave me intangible skills that I can carry to any new adventure in life, school, or work. I now know how to pick up the phone, do my best sales pitch, and get rejected without skipping a beat. (I can’t imagine how much this will help me recover after a bad attempt at picking up a girl on campus) I know how to deal with success and how to deal with failure. I’m confident in presenting myself and my product with a professional and personal touch. I feel prepared to meet deadlines, work as a team, and even compete in a friendly nature.

Most importantly, I’ve gained a great amount of experience in managing my time, and my resources. The SF project forced me to prioritize my projects, and use my great amount of resources around the office to get ahead. I had to find a friendly co-worker or two to assist me with the project and keep me on the right track. I had to put other, sometimes more preferable, projects aside so I could be ready and prepared to share my updates on the Thursday conference call.

These sorts of skills are transferable in so many aspects of my future and I look forward to utilizing them.

-TJ 

So it all comes down to this. A final week to finish up those projects, get to know the people you always wanted to meet, and letting Gallagher know what you really think of them. The nine week interview is almost up and at taht point we’ll be given our final evaluations by our supervisors and we’ll be given the chance to evaluate our last nine weeks with the company.

In that process a lot of us will ask ourselves, could we imagine doing this for MORE than nine weeks? 52 weeks? 500 weeks?! These are realistic questions we have to think about. What distinguishes this decision for this group of interns vs. the same question facing previous years interns is the climate in which we are living. I’m sure we’ve all been told many many times to grab any job opp we can find and hold on for deal life. It effects our thought processes on the summer whether we’ll admit it or not. Coming on full-time will be a different experience than the internship. Expectations will be larger, stakes will be higher, and Act II of our lives will be just beginning.

Enjoy the last week everyone, work hard, and take a good look at the possible upcoming decision.

-TJ

So this is a post for any of you who are working in a new city, one you didn’t grow up in or even necessarily go to college in. I am from the Midwest, born and raised, I spent time in St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Chicago. I never really thought about leaving until my freshman year of college when the attraction of California finally got to me and I put all my efforts to moving here.

After almost a year in LA it still feels like I’m on vacation. No winter, attractions everywhere, celebrity sightings, and gorgeous sunsets are rarities back at home. Yet I notice myself still referring to Minnesota as just that ‘home’. Going to school in a city is much different than working full time, and paying rent. Moving to LA full time would be a major long-term change for me. I’d be the first of my family to settle in a large west-coast city, and I have a hard time imagining raising a family here. It’s something I’ll continue to think about.

I have to remind myself how lucky I am to even be able to think about these kind of decisions. I know lots of people who would love to relocate or be given choices in location and jobs, I’m one of the fortunate few that gets to deal with these tough decisions. If anyone else is thinking about these relocation questions I’d love to hear about it.

-TJ

My name is TJ, I’m going into my senior year at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, CA. The school is about 30-40 miles outside of Los Angeles, and boasts only about 1200 students. However, it is part of the Claremont Colleges Consortium, which contains CMC, Pomona College, Scripps College, Pitzer College, and Harvey Mudd College. There is also two graduate universities located in close proximity. CMC tends to be more focused in Economics, Finance, International Relations, and leadership. Their economics program ranks among the top undergraduate programs in the country. Claremont, California is a quaint town of about 30,000 people, located next to the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains. The location of the campus is perfect for anyone wanting to explore. There are mountains, ski resorts, beaches, downtown, and small towns to visit. I also enjoy CMC because of the availability of professors and staff, and the close knit community of students. Plus its hard to argue with being able to visit the pool in January.

-TJ in LA

Hello world-wide web. Week six is wrapping up and salesforce is in full swing. I’d like to talk a bit about this salesforce project and balancing it with everything else. Now that I think we’ve all gotten comfortable in our summer associate positions we’re being given a lot more freedom to delegate our own time. This can be a burden and a blessing. It’s nice to feel responsible for my own success time management. But i also have difficulty from time to time prioritizing what needs to get done first. I have a tendency to approach my projects like assignments in school, I line them up and attempt to finish them all in the order i received them. However, some projects are not as urgent as others, some require a few hours while others require days of research and help from coworkers. I think it is important that while we are given freedom in how we choose to spend our work time, we should keep in close contact with a mentor to help us stay organized and efficiently on task.

Lastly, I’ll fill you all in on something I have picked up recently this week from my full-time colleagues. Here in LA, we have four interns, I know that in most other offices you only have one, but hopefully you can find something to take out of this. Because we have four interns it is easy to get too comfortable around one another and not branch out in the office. This does not go unnoticed. Coworkers appreciate when you seek them out for help on a project, a quick question, or just to talk. They want to get to know us, and honestly we need them to know us if we want a good referral to the boss when the internship is over. So, you may already be doing this, but I would encourage everyone, myself included, to branch out. Get away from the computer and cell phone and go out to lunch with someone you have not talked to much. It may be difficult to initiate, but it will be worth it.
TJ 

Hello digital world. I’ve never blogged before but if I can remember what I’ve read in the past it’s basically the scrawling of one’s thoughts onto a digital journal. Here goes…

I took a look at the other posts on the site so far and I was struck with how many people are thoroughly enjoying their summer experience so far. I thought for a moment and realized that I too was not only satisfied with my experience thus far, but extremely happy with it as well. I don’t just wake up in the morning so that I can keep Roxana and Jura happy, I get up with a smile on my face because I get to go to a place of business where people are waiting to see me, and relying upon me. I have work that is important not only to my own development, but to the company as a whole. For example, I’m currently working on a presentation about Itasca, which is pretty much just a personal development project, but in the meantime a consultant just stopped by my desk with a project that was going to develop useful, relevant information for one of the biggest clients our GBS LA office has! Pretty cool for an intern position huh?

I find myself staying later than 4:30 not to please my boss or give the apprearance of a brown-nosing overacheiver, but rather because Gallagher has made me into an overacheiver, they have given me a responsibility and I intend to meet it.

Hopefully that was a decent first crack at a blog, perhaps a bit too much rambling…but I’ll sign out with this. If in the end we don’t get a job with Gallagher, our next positions have got a pretty high bar to match up against. Anyone agree?

-TJ