I am now  nearly 2 weeks into the externship at IBM global hardware here in Raleigh- pronounced R-aaaa-leigh, North Carolina. It's been fascinating so far to digest and comprehend the sheer scale and global coverage of this company. My team has people all over US, Scotland and in Asia Pacific or AP. I am deployed in the ISC, E2E, Quality team which means Integrated Supply Chain, End to End quality engineering, basically trying to improve quality in the final customer systems which IBM makes and procures from a myriad of suppliers and OEMs....... We are based on a huge campus of 9,000 people which was reduced in the early 90's with the sell off of the Think Pad business to Lenovo. The scale and size of this campus alone is quite staggering and in a way you could get lost here. We have been fortunate to be working with a superb mentor who has been with the company for > 25 years and most people here have been long term IBMers so they have seen many changes. Walter has also kindly shown us the sites of the area including a micro brewery which included offerings like Sweet Josie and Shotgun Betty! More importantly he has guided us through the structure and helped to explain the millions of acronyms- there is a whole new language for Bec and I to learn! So I call it the Acronym Capital (AC) in NC. The size of this gorilla in Jay speak is actually a fantastic opportunity for us both to explore career options and understand how varied and flexible the company is. As an example due to sheet ice and snow we had to work from home on Tuesday and things worked seamlessly with remote access and instant sametime messaging - IBM just want the job done and how we do it is called work life integration. Another key observation is that many of the senior positions or Vice Presidents are women, so breaking the traditional view of hardware and manufacturing  as being male dominated. I am also very keen to find our more about the environmental projects and leadership programmes on offer. The gorilla has many doors which will try to open in our time here and IBM did successfully reinvent itself in the early 00s so much change is still ongoing as the technology and services markets move at a phenomenal pace.

Finally I am looking forward to some golf in some of the finest courses in the US and more outdoor walking and running with many National parks nearby,plus trips to the nearby mountains and oceans. Big Blue offers us a chance to really put into practice our learning's from Babson and hopefully we can even shake things up a little by the end of the project! I just hope the weather warms up as I am the little blue fingers and toes at the moment .....