Memory Lane

I will never forget the first day of work at SHM on Monday morning. One hour in, the MAs were told that we had a department meeting, and we were expected to be there. Two hours later, we all walked out completely confused and overwhelmed. Looking back, I don't think I would have had it any other way. SHM has always used a kind of "tackle this head-on" approach, and so they kind of threw us right in there and let us assimilate to our new environment. However, I wish that I had learned how quickly things change around here. Who knew that the Monday Morning Meeting would be completely re-vamped? And that SHM would break out the franchise model? To me, I've always considered all of these things as examples of the "real world," aka the working world or "Corporate America" as Emily would call it.

The most useful thing that I have learned here is brand management. I have always been interested in branding because it is such an essential part of a company and its marketing, but I have really gotten to understand the concepts and strategies while working at SHM. Looking back so far, there aren't very many things that I could say I wanted to learn but didn't. SHM made it very clear that I was going to be able to work on what I wanted to build upon and everyone made sure it happened - from Web 2.0 to design to a little PR!

Backtracking to Week 1, I would say that the tutorials were somewhat helpful. It was nice to acknowledge the fact that perhaps we had never worked with many of these systems. But overall, it was very overwhelming. Many of the iMIS tutorials were confusing and were re-explained to us when the time came to apply them. I think in the future, it would be more helpful to introduce new sections of the database as they came along. Even now, with only one month left, I still get lost in iMIS sometimes... I think the franchise model will really help to organize and streamline M&M in general though. And that the next round of MAs will definitely benefit from it. Personally, I'm glad that I was able to witness the before and after effect.

This blog post made me a little sad. :(