First Day of Work

Socrates once wrote “Humor is the best policy”. Then again, that hemlock joke only works the first time.

I had my first day back at Travelers today. This will be my second summer as an intern there. I went through all the usual orientation stuff as expected (it went a bit faster this time because only 8 of us were starting today). We have a new logo, replacing our beloved umbrella after many years of faithful service. The umbrella is going on to bigger and better things, perhaps, at Citigroup (they took it when we spun off last summer).
Anyway, I got to meet my mentor for this summer right away.. his name is Raj (I don’t try to write or pronounce his full name, not that it’s too hard, I just don’t try that hard). He was really friendly and showed me around where he works and we went out to lunch a bit later (Travelers picked up the tab for that one!). We seemed to have a lot of similar attitudes about work and stuff, even though we come from very different backgrounds.
Unlike when I interned last winter, I have a computer on my first day of work! Better yet, it’s a brand new (Compaq) machine.. Pentium 4. It’s a really nice looking piece of hardware. Unfortunately, thanks to the “Gods of PeopleSoft”, my user ID doesn’t become active in any of the company’s systems until tomorrow, so I can’t log on until then. Its day will come…

The project looks like it has been making some progress. The original date to move to production was in March, but it was eventually moved back to August. So I’m coming in as we’ re moving into the testing phase. One of my first tasks is going to be to figure out a way to quickly populate an MS SQL database with data imported from notes as well as our reference data. Once the SQL database gets up (the last thing we’re really waiting for), it will be a ton of work to push everything through testing.

I’m glad the schedule has worked out this way: I’ve been able to watch a project go from brainstorming and requirements specification to testing and production. Also, I found out that my report generation code (filling out word templates with a bunch of techniques and data sources) is going to be used, almost unaltered in testing, and maybe production. It’s cool to think that a significant amount of my code is going to be used in a corporate product!