Unfortunately I failed in my attempts turn our rental car into a time machine this week so I do need to go home on Saturday! But I know that I have an exciting year ahead of me with my dissertation round the corner and the challene of the graduate job market- so its not all bad.

Last week one of the directors arranged for the Finance Transformation interns to visit the PWC offices in Tampa. This was an excellent opportunity to network and find out about a career in professional services.  We got a nice leather document holder and handy umbrella- it rains here almost as much as in Scotland.  We met people from Audit, Tax and Advisory and had an informal Q&A followed by a tour of the office and then dinner at a nearby restaurant.  The conversation wasn’t all work related and we had fun talking about our experiences of Europe/America as tourists. There are a lot more differences than I first thought but that’s another story. They were also interested to hear about the Saltire Foundation and they only had positive things to say about Jabil too which was great.

At the end of last week I had to collate my findings on the financial reporting validation I was doing and present them to Bain consultants who will be rolling out the tool to the whole company. Some last minute technical problems nearly ruined two weeks’ worth of work. However, with literally minutes until the meeting started Steve and I managed to get the report to run correctly and everyone concerned was happy with the end result.

The weekend was one of the best since getting here.  On Saturday some of us went to St Armand’s Circle in Sarasota (a big roundabout with 5 roads coming off it, each with loads of nice shops and restaurants and a beautiful beach nearby) we got great weather and enjoyed swimming in the sea and relaxing.

On Sunday we went to Weeki Wachee River and hired canoes for a 3 hour trip down a beautiful fresh water river with lots of rope swings and swimming areas. Again it was sunny and there was lots of wildlife; fish, terrapins, birds and horrible big spiders!  We were in tandem canoes that required a degree of coordination which Tanya and I lacked   at first.  We definitely ended up in a big bush full of spiders more than once! That aside, it was an awesome experience.

Monday came and the last week started well with me closing out one of my projects and highlighting a problem with one of the applications which could cause a problem after it goes live. It’s never a great feeling to be highlighting a problem, especially when the solution is outside your skill-set. It was an IT issue so I had to work with a developer to fix the problem but it was brilliant to see the issue resolved so quickly and know that I had some involvement in it.

Tuesday morning was spent organizing and preparing for a global systems performance test on Wednesday morning. This involved creating a large results template which is easy to reconcile, creating in-depth user instructions and sending out multiple communications around the world to ensure a smooth process.

Have a good last few days and get home safe,

Chris