The global marketing plan is now starting to resemble a real, functional tool to help with the co-ordination and planning of all the various components.  We have started to add in all the figures for the budget and have sliced and diced all the information in various ways to get an overall company view of the next 12-18 months (for any SBS students who remember tearing their hair out during the MDP1 Excel tests, turns out the stuff they taught us actually comes in really useful!!) Next week is going to be spent pulling together everything for our final presentation and adding all the finishing touches to the plan to make it look professional and fully functional for the staff who are actually going to be implementing it.

This week I also attended a blogging and social networking workshop. Lab49 have their own blog space where employees are encouraged to discuss their work and share ideas or code that will help with their programming and development. The workshop looked at how blogging has developed over the past few years and how it can be used to manage your own personal brand. It also explored the benefits of blogging such as the ‘sharing is power’ concept, and how getting your name out there, leaving a digital footprint and sharing your ideas and experience is becoming more important in the competition for jobs. We were also given tips on ways of getting your blog more publicity and attracting readers, including a list of buzz words which are proven to increase your readings. And so the blog title for this week was created. I am curious to see if these words really will amp up the blog views!

A meeting last week quickly turned into a reflective conversation about our time at Lab49 and how it had impacted our outlook on what we wanted to do with ourselves after graduation. I came here with a rather clear image of what I wanted to do and hoped that this internship would confirm this, but to be honest it’s totally made me question it (in a good way!) It has opened my eyes to all the different options there are out there and showed me how the skills I have learnt could easily be applied in a wide variety of roles. I do know that I want to be working in a client-facing, project-based role but within this there are so many options and decisions I will have to make: structured graduate scheme in a large blue chip firm or more self-defined training in a smaller boutique firm? Strategy, operations, finance, marketing? UK, USA, Asia (or anywhere else in the world!)? Year out or straight into work? The list continues… Maybe it will have to come down to a leap of faith or maybe I can put some of my management science knowledge to good use and get VISA or DPL software to make the decision for me! But for now I am going to spend some time talking to my network of contacts to find out more about the various career paths and all the options available. These conversations started earlier this week when Ross introduced us to his friend Helen Hibbott who is a Chief Talent Officer at a large marketing agency. She was able to answer all my questions, gave great advice and left me with a lasting thought-

“Don’t do what you feel you ought to do, do what you can do”.

Outside the office life in NYC never stops. We have ventured out to Long Island to discuss the up-coming Highland Games, pulled on our NY Yankees tops and headed for the Bronx to see the Yankees take on the Detroit Tigers (which I am glad to report they won), walked the Brooklyn Bridge, mastered some new tricks at the trapezing and taken a 24 hour trip to Atlantic City where we met up with one of the guys from work who showed us around the high spots! Thanks to Ross, we also finally got Chris to eat raw fish and rare steak and then admit that it was good- quite possibly the biggest achievement to date!

Anyways, I’m having a blast and will be sure to make the most of what’s left! Hope everyone else does too J

C x