Wellllll... that about covers it.
It's August 6. Where has the summer gone? I keep saying this to myself when I think about this internship. It's flown by so fast.
So many things have happened this summer. The great, and simultaneously bad, thing about the end of the summer is thinking back on all the things that happened- or should have happened. I took the LSAT, got lost in Chicago, got together and broke up with a girl, missed what I think may have been a great opportunity (I think it was, anyway. Details are still hazy.), saw a fireworks show in someone's back yard that completely outclassed some of the cities' fireworks I've seen, and met some great people. Busy summer.
Friday I'll leave for Disney. Carl, Greg, Eric and I have been planning it forever. I know I'll be excited for the trip, but I know I'm going to miss Motorola and its people.
Since the beginning of my internship at Motorola, I've been really tired. I can't tell if it's the waking up early every morning, or if it's the stress of trying to do a good enough job to make some sort of impression, but the whole ordeal is incredibly tiring.
Which is not to say that it's unrewarding. I've learned a lot so far about volatility and instability in a Fortune 500 company. When talking to a host in the newly-opened Innovation Center the other day, I was dumbfounded to learn that his co-worker (who I had talked to a day before) had been the most recent victim of Motorola's workforce reduction. I imagine that there are thousands of stories just like mine all around the company.
In any case, I can't imagine a more productive or educational use of my summer. My experiences so far have been nothing short of fantastic and unbelievable. It's still incredibly humbling to walk out of the elevator into the hallway of the seventh floor and look through the Motorola "batwing" logos that adorn each conference room door and see the faint outline of Chicago in the distance. It is a reminder of how lucky I really am to have such an opportunity, and how it just as easily could have been someone else feeling this way instead of me.
It was admittedly easier to wake up at 6 yesterday morning than I thought it would be. Maybe I was excited for my first day at Motorola, or maybe it was that I had gone to bed at a decent hour for the first time in months. Either way, I ate breakfast and was on the road with my new roommate by 7:05.
When the phone rang on Monday, I was positive that it was my mom calling to help me draft an email to Motorola asking if they had made a decision about the summer internship position I had applied for; after all, she had just sent me an email about it. Instead it was Mary, a recruiter for Motorola. She wanted to know if I was still interested in the internship. Of course I was.
It's a nice feeling. After a couple weeks where it seemed that nothing was really going the way that I'd like it to, here is a pretty big win. And it's amazing how it seemed to have sparked a pretty nice week, too.
Over the next four months, I imagine that the Motorola category will expand at a rate comparable to the experiences I have while working there. Check them out, comment, discuss amongst yourselves.