Things that are better than last year’s internship:

- Cooler, laid-back manager

- Worked on web development

- Actually worked on-site, instead of in a suite 15 min. away, contracted by the company
- Have my own cube and nametag on my cube

- Team Outings/lunches/younger co-workers to hang around with

- Included more on the team (meetings, SameTime)

- Able to do some designing

- Apparently worked as part of the group dubbed as “International Coalition of Babes” LOLOL.
Free cool gadgets/equipment gotten from working in the Asset Management Dept.:

- iPAQ PDA

- Microsoft wireless mouse with zoom-in button

- Dell 610 laptop configured with 2GB RAM

- USB drive

- Speakers (loud music playing)

- Dual 19inch Flat panels for kick ass poster presentation

- Wireless internet

- Admin on own computer (ability to install software)

- cellphone (optional)

It’s amazing how summer flies by. The intern welcoming reception was just a couple of months ago and now suddenly we’re already getting invites for the intern farewell reception a week from Friday. I felt like I haven’t even been here for that long. After July a lot of interns are going to be gone so it’ll be quieter. I’m staying though till August though.

Yesterday was the IT intern poster presentation. Every year, the interns are given the opportunity to do a presentation showcasing their summer assignments to managers and people from across all divisions. There’s a prize of $500 gift certificates to different places. My poster from last year was incompariable to others in terms of creativity. But I didn’t end up winning. -_- This year, the space alone was different from last year’s, which was one of the rooms on the lower level. This year, it’s in the main building’s cafeteria, which definitely receives more attention. I had previously arranged for dual monitors to be set up along with my poster, and I decided about a week ago that I was going to design brochures to hand out as well. I spent late Saturday night and most of Sunday working on the brochure and finishing up my poster. I left the poster pretty standard, and chose to rely on the my dual screens and brochures to wow the audience. I waited till the morning of the presentation to print the brochures out on the company’s color printer. I crossed my fingers that it would all work out. I was relying on quite a few things going right.

Morning came, and I had managed to print 12 pages of my brochure when my co-worker stopped me by the printer to remind me of our meeting in 2 minutes. I panicked a bit, thinking that I wouldn’t have enough time to finish printing my brochures, cut them, fold them, AND print out copies of my resume and intern summary before 11:45am rolled around. But the meeting ended on schedule, and I continued the printing. Thankfully, the printer I was using wasn’t used by others TOO much (only one instance of interference that wasted 20 pages of my brochure-paper). Also, my manager happened to have a small slicer for me to cut my pages with ease, so that sped up the process quite a bit. I was able to get about 40 brochures done by 11:45. We drove over to the main building to set up everything. The presentation itself wasn’t bad, but standing for 3 hours in platform heels AND missing lunch was. In the end, I had about 3 brochures left, and felt exhausted. My manager had come around to view others’ posters and mingle. After the presentation, as we were cleaning up, he told me that the word around was, my presentation had “blown everyone away” and was “incompariable/no competition.” One distinctive comment from a manager was “a professional and a bunch of amateurs.” ^^ When I got back to my office, I was pleasantly surprised to find an email from my manager’s manager, telling me that she though mine was the most professional. She even cc-ed our director on the email. O.O’ Needless to say, I was pretty happy to hear that even though I didn’t feel like I did any special job. Perhaps it was the brochures, or the dual monitors. I’m not exactly looking to win the prize - instead tried to get my name out by putting my contact info on the back of each brochure. It would be extremely ironic and amusing if I did win though. =3

One interesting incident during the presentation though…one of the other interns had these little blue Abbott stress balls on his table, so I had taken one earlier. As I was talking to another girl, she asked me where I had gotten these balls. I pointed over to his table and went “Yup, he has blue balls” - paused - and we both busted out laughing. The girl went over to him and told him the joke, and he jokingly said he should have had “the guy with blue balls” as his poster title. Ah, the fun in wording.

The minor delay in updating is most likely due to general busyness at work and at my night class, as well as working hard on the things in my to-do list (which *laughs* has been organized). It has been added on to, so it’s more of a wish-I-could-do-it-all list. At the moment, the Icons category is of lowest priority, and my site revamps the highest. The past few days have been more or less devoted to the remaking (yet again) of Total Venus Destination, so it should be fully updated in the next couple of days. I can’t get much done between work and night classes, but I do attempt. My goal for the summer is to design ‘final’ layouts for many of my sites. Many are them are going into archive mode, meaning it will very rarely - if ever - be updated again. Most of what I want to do is already listed on the to-do list, so I won’t go into detail.

July is usually an incredibly busy month. Work and night class both pick up the pace, so I suddenly have everything to do and the workload is up to my ears. I do like to keep myself busy, but there never seems to be a middle point. Usually it’s either incredibly boring, or incredibly busy. For the next two weeks of work, I have an important informational interview with one of the top IT managers and a cruicial intern poster presentation that requires much time, devotion and creativity, especially with my competitiveness. For my night class, the next two weeks means an exam, several quizzes and a group presentation, perpetually landing right behind my poster presentation. All of these are on top of my usual work, which has also picked up quite a bit since the beginning of May.

Work-wise, the development of the website itself has been temporarily halted. The priority for the past month or so has been the Adobe Intelligent Document Platform (IDP). Adobe is basically evolving PDFs into a more interactive program, where viewers can show/hide certain portions, drag, zoom and rotate 3D models, and even incorporate Flash into them. Furthermore, they developed a Policy Server that manages tight security on the PDFs. Examples include: watermarks that only appears at a certain DPI to prevent plagiarism, password protection (even from admins), Timestamp approval, 256-bit encryption algorithm (which, if you know anything about encryptions, has been estimated to take about 149 trillion years to crack via brute force), literally self-destruction after a specified amount of time, and more. It’s pretty amazing stuff to be working with, though I haven’t delved deep at all yet.

The Adobe form I’m working on in Adobe Designer serves as an alternative to the HTML/Coldfusion forms originally created. The Adobe form combines what would have been 5 separate forms, into one PDF and has quite a few show/hide functions, along with value passing and database transferring that requires some Java/Javascript coding. I’m really enjoying it, seeing as it will actually be useful to clients. This is my main project for the summer, although I still have the website and other side jobs as well.

Hopefully I can get everything done before the summer ends. @.@ This is where real time budgeting comes in. XD

This week was pretty eventful, which is unusual. By now, most of the interns have arrived, and the orientations are all over. The intern program has kicked off with a Career Forum on the latter half of Monday, and an intern reception immediately following the forum. The Forum consisted of 4 breakout sessions:

Strategic Approach To Networking

- Gain an understanding on the different types of networking

- Identify techniques to make the first move in establishing a networking relationship

- Tools to use during a networking meeting

 Bridging The Gap Between Academia and Industry 

- Managing the transition to work

- What’s really important in the first year

- 12 steps to first year success

Growth Planning and Goal Setting

- Identify where you are today and where you are going

- Set goals for yourself around the Abbott core competencies

- Gain tools to start your growth planning process

How To Get The Job You Want

- Important Career Fair, Interview and Resume Tips

- Showcasing your strengths

You could choose 2 out of the 4 to go to, and I choose Networking and Growth Planning/Goal Setting. They were, for the most part, Powerpoint presentations with a few activities to keep your blood flowing. The event was business formal, so everyone was in nice suits. It was a sea of black when I walked in, with a couple of the girls choosing to go all white or all red. We were provided a boxed lunch upon arriving at 11am. I looked for the only other intern that worked in our building, as he was the only one I knew. The majority of the interns stay at one of the two local Marriott residence inns, all expenses paid by the company. But if you lived close enough, you didn’t have the option. I live only 20-30 minutes away depending on traffic, so I stayed home.

So, I grabbed my boxed lunch and luckily found the other intern as I was coming up the stairs. Fortunately there was an empty seat so I took it. I was so glad to see him that I didn’t look around at the other 2 interns with him. Once I gathered my bearings and turned to them, I was very surprised to find one of my high school classmates - one that I knew fairly well - there as well. We had taken AP Biology and AP Psychology together, and both were in many study sessions for the classes. He didn’t remember my name at first, since we haven’t seen each other for 3+ years. But it was pretty much smooth from there. We joked and laughed, and I was pretty relieved to be among a group I knew. They filled me in on the latest with our old high school, which was one of the best when we were there, but went completely down the tube after we left. One of the teachers we knew was caught having sex with one of his students (15 years old), and the new principle was in a scandal that involved him taking the government funded money for the school for phone sex talks and what not. You hear about these things all the time and don’t give a second thought, but when it happens to people you know or near you, it just feels weird. After lunch, we proceeded to an opening speech/presentation by the College Relations people, who continued mentioning countless times that we are the ‘elite’ (how they love that word) top 2% of the applicants (200/10,000 applicants) and how we’re the best of the best. -_-  We then broke off to do our sessions. They were pretty useful, almost common sense when you hear it, but it’s nice to be reminded. We were given a huge binder with all of the sessions’ powerpoints in there, so we could gain insight from them even if we didn’t go to all of them. We headed out to the intern reception when the sessions were over. There were a couple of games set up, including miniature golf, basketball, and sack tossing (can’t think of the correct term). There was a lot of food, from burgers to hot dogs to macaroni & cheese, fried corndogs, cheeseballs, fruits, root beer floats, slushies, and various desserts. The managers were all invited as well, so we chatted until 6pm. I had a night class after that at 7-10pm, and I was completely pooped. We took an extensive test, and my hand was incredibly sore from writing after 3 hours. Don’t you love crazy days?