Work or Bust? The Internship Begins

Hey All -

I guess I want to keep an updated account of my internship so everyone knows how my life outside Auditing is going. I am going to try and write it as unbiased as possible, so that way when I reread this in a couple months, I will have an honest account of my feelings throughout the internship so in case I get a full-time offer, I can have something to help make a decision on.

So I arrived here in Modena on Friday. I have to admit, I loved the city at first sight, so I was pretty bummed when I discovered that I will be living 15 km outside Modena in a tiny city called Fiorano. It is most well know (read only known for) the Ferrari race track here. The apartment itself is an interesting building. There are four of us interns here, and we were all a little disappointed about it. The apartment is recently restored, however, the furniture dates from, what I would guess, the turn of the century. Currently there is no hot water, but that should come tomorrow. Besides that the town is *charming*.

The internship started today at 10:00am. Today we mostly learned about the company's product offerings. XXXXX is tagged as the XXXXXX. Most of their products are green certified, and they go out of their way to source organic raw materials. When I first accepted the offer, I thought that this would be right up my alley. I will be doing a market development project in Germany this summer, and that too was very interesting to me, but I was worried about working in an Italian company. It is said that Italian companies are inefficient, formal, and way too political. I can tell you that my first impression of work was anything but that!!!!! The culture is very informal, and it appears to be run on German efficiency, well, ok maybe not German, but certainly pretty efficient. I will discover the political situation as time goes on.

Needless to say, that this was a giant relief. The production facilities and warehousing are nearly 100% automated and efficiency ratings are very high. This was most certainly unexpected, but reassuring to me. We got to see the two plants here surrounding Modena and then see their state of the art learning lab. Work has a pretty cool business model and positions themselves as a high quality (high cost) producer of building supplies ranging from paint to pvc to adhesives. I won't go into too much more details about the detail of the Company, but rather on a broad scope they seem like a top notch and high savvy company.

The people there all seem really friendly. This was not a surprise, but merely a bonus. Everyone we spoke to was extremely knowledgeable about the industry, company, and products they offer. I was impressed by the business savvy that every employee has; from the R&D and Quality Control departments, to area managers, to the engineers, all of them were top notch people.

I will cut this a bit short as I am exhausted from my first day, but before I leave, I discovered today that I will be leaving to Germany sometime next week, so that is something to look forward to!

cheers,