We arrived in Houston, Texas on Saturday, to be welcomed by unbelievable heat and freeways glittering with Lone Star State flags. It was immediately obvious that our two months were not only going to be scorching hot but also drenched with Texan culture!

We met Simon and Jim, two of the Saltire fellows the following day for a leisurely brunch. They told us tales of Houston hospitality and the city’s hot spots. As we sat in a bar called ‘Frontier’, with swinging salon style doors, we were about to be introduced to the famous southern hospitality. Within an hour half the bar had joined our table, intrigued by our Scottish voices and pale skin. It was the quite the reverse of back home, where no stranger would introduce themselves and come to join you!

The culture of friendliness and openness is also very apparent within the company walls of The Wood Group. Everyone we were introduced to took their time to speak to us and to tell us that their door was always open. As the five of us sat around a table with Derek Blackwood, (President of Production Facilities and Global Scot) he reiterated this and from the first day it was clear that this open door culture was genuine.

The Wood Group is split into many different businesses and in our induction we were taken round a few of the Houston offices including the LIT (Light Industrial Turbine) workshop, where the engineering of the Oil and Gas Turbines take place. Despite having no prior engineering knowledge, it was invaluable to understand the products and services that are at the heart of The Wood Group.

My first assignment in the Human Resource (HR) department is looking at Health and Safety (H&S). As The Wood Group prepares to move location they are implementing an ergonomic work environment; in preparation for which I am creating presentations, employee questionnaires, and working with outsourced companies to help with the implementation. This project is particularly interesting to me as last term one of my university electives was Health and Safety Law. It is very rewarding to be able to put into practice something that I studied at university. It is interesting to see already how the US and UK differ from an HR and H & S perspective. America has a legal system that places an emphasis on protecting corporations - yet there is a strong litigious culture, quite the antithesis to Britain. However, the HR department has a very British feel (although many nationalities are represented) and employees appear to be very well looked after, above and beyond the requirements of Texan law.

As well as H&S Law, I also took International Strategic Management as an elective, which concentrated on how multi national organisations structured their management depending on national laws, culture etc. The Wood Group has already shown me a practical example of how this can be implemented; although the Houston office has less HR legal regulations than the Aberdeen office, their employees are treated identically. I am sure if I went to the Aberdeen office I would find that they have adopted the open door policy so prevalent in the USA, but rarely found and highly sought after in the UK.