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Our adventure here is nearly over. Today is our last day
working at NCR; we have tomorrow and Friday off, and we go home on
Sunday. Last week's project was completed on Friday afternoon. Despite
our working ahead at the beginning of the week, it actually got down to
the wire Friday after lunch, as we battled technological inconveniences
and translation errors. We prevailed though, and it was successfully
printed over the weekend. We did have a sort of funny experience, right
before the project was finished.
Joelle was frantically trying to finish making a
value-stream map while Liz and Charles were fighting with Microsoft
Word's obnoxious automatic formatting, when Michael Zhang walked up to
inform us that he wanted us to present our completed display to the
heads of the different departments on Monday. We responded that we
would be pleased to, etc. Not ten minutes later, Jack Mannion (the head
of manufacturing) stopped by to say he was looking forward to seeing our
display, and did we know we were having a meeting on Monday morning. We
responded that we had heard something of the sort, and we were also
looking forward to seeing the finished product. About an hour later,
one of the HR people dropped off a memo, which also informed us that
were to have a meeting on Monday morning, at 10:30. An hour after that,
another HR person came to ask us if we had gotten the memo. By the time
we left that evening, fully six people had told us about Monday
morning's meeting. It was another Office Space moment ("did you get the
memo?").
At about 4:59, there was suddenly all this commotion --
the sounds of laptops being closed, briefcases zipped, and final phone
calls wrapped up. A mass exodus ensued. At 5:03, we were practically
the only people in the building. We left, secure in the knowledge that
we had a meeting Monday morning at 10:30 AM. The families didn't get
together this weekend, so we all had completely different experiences.
Liz went to the summer palace (Charles and Joelle had
already gone earlier in the trip) and was amazed to see that there are,
in fact, more than three white people in China. Almost all of them are
at the Summer Palace. The other half of them are at the Temple of
Heaven, where Liz journeyed next.
Joelle went out for Korean food on Saturday, which she
especially enjoyed, although her mouth remained on fire for the next
eight hours. That evening she and Helen (her host) took Helen's
daughter ice skating at the mall. On Sunday, Helen took Joelle to a
market in downtown Beijing where she bought a lovely new jacket by Prada.
She paid less than $14.
Charles went shopping as well, but his main event of the
weekend was visiting with his host student from our Beijing sister
school, Ding Yi Lin. They had a lot of deep intellectual conversations
about religion, politics, and economics. Other than that, we're not
sure what they did (Charles isn't here at this exact moment).
We all returned from our weekends to the highly
anticipated Monday morning meeting. The first thing we saw when we
walked into work was our completed project prominently displayed in the
main lobby. We met at our display, along with Michael Zhang, Jack
Mannion, Michael Low (head of NCR Beijing), some people visiting from
Dayton, and a whole bunch of other people. Jack introduced the project,
and then asked us to speak a little bit about it, which we did quite
successfully, if we do say so ourselves. The meeting was quite
informal, but extremely positive. We were proud of our work.
By that time it was
almost lunch, and we decided to go on an adventure during our lunch
hour. It was quite exciting…we walked about two blocks down the
street to Subway. It was great eating cold food, and raw
vegetables. They don't eat a lot of cold food around here, and
since it's been so hot, it was refreshing. When we returned, we
were met by George Cheng, who is head of the SCER team...and please
don't ask us what SCER stands for -- all I know is it's something
corporate sounding. I don't think half the people who work at NCR
even know what it stands for. I can tell you that it is basically a
mini R&D team, which customizes the existing products for specific
clients. They are the only such team in the world, so they are
pretty important, to put it mildly.
Basically, we spent the
next few days learning how to use the program that they use to
design parts. It's called Wildfire, and it's basically a 3-D
imaging program. It is a little complicated, and of course the
symbols it uses are totally undecipherable (even more so than a
chinese character we've never seen before). We had some success
learning, though. Charles was particularly good at using the
program. He took the tasks we were assigned to a new, creative
level. He designed a new wheel for Mercedes (complete with tire)
and today he designed the most pimp poker table you've ever seen.
Liz and I were more quickly frustrated, and quickly surrendered the
mouse to him. We decided to write one more journal entry instead.
This morning was the
greatest, though. We headed over to East Balt, Inc., which is where
Helen Wu (Joelle's host) works. It is an industrial bakery whose
only client is McDonald's. The factory in Beijing is the largest of
all their bakeries, and produces hamburger buns and tortillas. When
we walked in the building, the first thing we noticed was that it
smelled like yeast -- and fresh-baked bread. We took off all our
jewelry, and donned long white coats emblazoned with the East Balt
logo, in preparation for our bakery tour. Just outside the bakery
doors, we put on not one, but two hairnets, and washed our hands
thoroughly. We all wish we could have taken pictures of us in our
Baker's outfits. Charles looked especially attractive in his
hairnets. None of us had ever been in an industrial bakery before,
so we were amazed at all the machinery. It was fascinating -- and
mesmerizing. we all could have stood there and watched the process
for hours. We got to eat hamburger buns fresh out of the oven
(they're actually fantastic, when they're fresh), and as we left,
our guide gave us 2 dozen fresh buns and 3 dozen fresh tortillas.
We carried our loot back into NCR, much to the amusement of our
coworkers. They think we're crazy anyway.
At the end of the day, we
said our goodbyes, took a few pictures, and looked forward to our
two days "off." This internship has been priceless; the sheer
amount of material we've learned concerning business, and other
topics, is staggering. This has been the quintessential
character-building experience, and we can't thank enough the people
who made it available to us. Our host families have been kinder and
more welcoming than we could ever have hoped, and everyone at the
company was more than supportive and always willing to answer our
questions. It is a pity every student can't have the taste of the
global market that we have had. Our only real goal at the beginning
of this internship was to learn as much as we could, and generally
maximize the resources at our disposal. We hope we have succeeded
in that, and made our sponsors proud.
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