Day 2 – Tuesday

Today we went to one of the IBM leaning and teaching centre in central England. In the morning, Stef, a British student who is studying business studies in Manchester, drove us up to the location. He gave me the description of how to get there. Therefore, I became the navigator. I felt like in the wild field car racing. He is quite friendly guy again. But his car was really hot. Yesterday he said he hadn’t driven for two years, and he have just driven again for two weeks, and told us to be prepared to die. Sounds scary, but I know he just kidding. And from today his performance, he let go the clutch too quick every time, and sometime I felt he couldn’t manage very well on the high way. Once when he tried to cut the line to overtake the car ahead, he didn’t notice a fast oncoming vehicle behind. When he noticed, he came back to the current line at once, but it was so dangerous.

In IBM centre, we were allocated one computer for a pair of us. It was an self-study section for Lotus-Notes. I tried out the “blue page” of IBM, which for searching IBMers’ contact information worldwide. I found myself have been added to the IBM network. And I also found that there are more than 10 people have “Xu” as their surname working for IBM, in the US, Canada, the UK and China, etc. Some of them are specialists.

In the afternoon’s Q&A section, someone asked about the training. Ben said we had better give our managers some evidence that we are well-prepared for it. For example, we had better not mention it at the very beginning, and do some free online training by ourselves. Then find some cases, write up a few pages, saying what our aim is, and why it is related to our job and roll in the team, show it to your managers. The it will has much higher chance to get the opportunities to attend the IBM training. That was a really good suggestion, because actually it is quite a general approach to bring up some requests to your manager. Be well-prepared, give evidence to your mangers that it is beneficial and worth.

Another really funny thing was that, a IBM web administrator before the training started told us that, every visit to external site will be monitored by the server. So we should not go to some site that we are not supposed to go, such as playboy. It was funny that, he said, because Playboy.com would trace and publish their most frequent visitors on the web. And a few years ago, Playboy.com’s No. one visitor was IBM, which means a lot of people visit that kind of sites during the office hours. And IBM became Playboy.com’s “biggest customer”. Everyone kept laughing and couldn’t stop. Thereafter, IBM banned the employees from going to those sites, and if anyone does that, they got warning instantly on their screen, if they still do that, they will be fired. This news must make IBM so embarrassed.

In the evening, I went to the pub for dinner, because I really don't to cook here. After dinner, I promised that Malaysian girl, Hayfa, to listen to her song. Because tonight is the Karaoke night. Her voice is not good for singing I think, but I still encouraged her, and told her that she sang so great. I was too hypocritical. It was so quiet and not many people in the pub when she sang. But just within a few minutes after her song, loads of students flooded into the pub, start singing, some started dancing as well, amazing. A technical guy who did training today were also there. He sang a pop song, and he were dancing while he was singing. He looked crazy, and he sang so bad, but so funny. The girl who sang with him just kept laughing, couldn’t sang a single word. Before we left the pub, I chatted up a British Indian with Mohami. That guy actually is a master student in Manchester University, and sometimes he teaches. And he told us his father is a professor of Business studies in Manchester U as well. No wonder he can teach so early, even he is only a Master’s student, not a PhD. He said IBM guaranteed to sponsor him for his year of Master’s. And he also reminded me that we can fill in an application form to IBM for the sponsorship for my final year. I will try as he said. But I think it is only under the circumstance that I impress the manager and the team very much.

Day 3 – Wednesday

Today was a really bad day for me. I was allocated to team four. We came up with an recruitment exercise in the morning. This afternoon, we gave a presentation in front of all the other students. It was a bad day because I worked with 5 British and an Indian. I couldn’t understand them that much because they were using a lot of slang, and the worst thing was I was pushed so hard to put down something not too good, although funny, onto the plastic (transparency). We had some space travel staff in our presentation. And one planet was called “Irritat”. And the people on this planet were very annoying, they keep talking to you, and I was forced to put down and said “imagine Sheff”. He looked so unhappy, and I believed that Sheff felt offended. I know I shouldn’t have done it. I learnt this time. My roll in the team was too weak. So I really need to improve my status in the team. Otherwise, similar thing would happen to me again. After all the presentation, that Malaysian girl, Hayfa, told me that. That Sheff on the night before got drunk, and he said to another student that “I don’t like your attitude.” That was really shocking to that student. Because he didn’t do anything particular, but he was told like that. This Sheff is really not a good and easy going guy. It seems I made a big mistake today in the presentation to “offense” him. Hopefully I won’t meet him again in my life time.

Another British girl had so brilliant presentation skills. From the very beginning of her presentation, we knew she is the one who HR department was looking for. She gave each word very clearly, not nervous at all. And there were very clear short breaks between each subtopic, making it very easy to understand and follow. And she has very good skill to change topics and passing topics to next presenter. She was really a model of how to give presentations. Of course she got the “best presenter” prize at the end as expected.

I remember another funny thing was, some one’s topic was “Incredibly Boring Machine – IBM”.

manson