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It's hard to believe we are almost halfway through our time here, it is definitely passing us by far too quickly! On Tuesday we got to attend the Management Gathering meeting for July, a monthly meeting of the managerial staff from Wood Group. The meeting allows management staff to interact, which is a difficult task at the Wood Group because of the sheer amount of offices in one city.

Derek Blackwood, the head of MEANAC, was a speaker at the event. I found his presentation really interesting because having worked in benefits I've been given an insight into the complexity of the Wood Group Organization. I knew before coming here that the Wood Group was made up of several companies but I didn't realize how many until I started to work with benefits. When we first arrived John Lee told us that after the acquisition of   J P Kenny the company tried to lose the brand name and incorporate J P Kenny with Wood Group, but this resulted in the loss of 50% of J P Kenny's business because they no longer seemed experts in their field. I come from a marketing background in university so I found this really interesting, just how strong a brand name can be. This lead to Wood Group allowing company's to keep their brand when they are bought over, which keeps customer loyalty along with other things. I agree with this approach in many ways, but as I've mentioned benefits has allowed me to see the complications that come along with 6000 employees working in US alone and Wood Group doesn't have a standardized pay roll so the paper work gets a bit crazy. I was interested that Derek spoke about some level of standardization for the MEANAC area to allow things to run more smoothly, without becoming a huge standardized corporation.

This past week Derek has put me in contact with the head of marketing for Mustang Engineering, I'm really excited about meeting her and hopefully brainstorming some ideas for my dissertation.

I'm into my fourth week in the benefits department working on COBRA spreadsheets and still working on the internal 401k audit. I never thought I'd learn so much so quickly.

We managed to get tickets for an Astros game on Sunday, I'm ashamed to say after living in Houston for 7 years this was my first game. It got off to a slow start but the Astros managed a grand slam, scoring with a player on every base, quiet a rarity I'm told.

I'm looking forward to my last two weeks in benefits, I'm getting to attend some more meetings and work on a project with HR from Aberdeen.

We are thinking of heading to San Antonio this weekend to see the River Walk and the Alamo, possibly stopping off at Six Flags! I need anything to keep me away from my from the shops here...Jen and I are lethal together.

Hope everyone is enjoying their internships,

Kirst