6 Months in Houston, Texas: It's Hot.

1) The state is huge.

262,000 square miles.

2) There are a lot of people living in Texas.

24.33 million people.

3) It's hot here.

90 degrees in October!

For my third rotation, I migrated South (again) for the winter months to work for the GE Oil & Gas business in Houston, Texas, and more specifically, the drilling & productions systems sub-business.

Houston is filled with Energy companies - I'm originally from Ohio and have never seen so many companies focused on energy in one city - but I'm getting used to it, as I see the Marathon Oil Tower on my drive to work.

My current rotation is scoped as "technical" - which is one requirement for us Energy IMLPs to "graduate" from the program (along with completing our greenbelt project and the bootcamps we've mentioned in previous posts).

I'm focusing on leading a web application development project for global resource scheduling for the Oil & Gas business. It will allow for increased visibility into daily operations of the GE Oil & Gas field personnel- who work to install, maintain, and fix our products in use by our customers around the world. It's a project where the benefits are not something that one has to explain - just talk to someone who works in the field service industry and they'll tell you.

As a project lead, my responsibilites vary from vendor management, architecture design, interface design, presentational speaking, functional requirements gathering and budget management to name a few. 

Since this is a global project,  I speak to groups of people from 3-4 different countries on a daily basis- Italy, India, and the UK to name a few.

So, even though I'm in Texas and I was out by the pool last weekend while many of my friends were dealing with the first snows of the season, I'm operating on "global time."

...Life After Graduation (from an '09 College Grad)

Hi! I'm Maurice Williams, a 2009 graduate with a degree Computer Science from WPI .  My post-college plans are to work with GE Capital (commercial finance) out of Danbury, CT as an IMLP.

I stumbled (or googled) across the IMLP blog as well as other fellow IMLP's and GE employees on Twitter while doing some background research on the program. This helped me get a feel for what to expect from working at a large and diverse company like GE.

Unlike most IMLP's, I will not have to relocate until my second rotation; this is because I am currently living in Norwalk, CT which is about 22 miles south the GE's Danbury office.

The time is drawing short, and my first day of orientation is getting near. As the days pass by, a storm of mixed emotions is taking place inside of me.

On one hand, I'm a little sad to be done with school and been able to spend as much time with my friends as we used to, but on the other I'm excited to venture on to a new journey while growing and achieve my goals and as watching my friends achieve theirs.

I am also looking forward to making new friends during bootcamp and contributing the other side-projects while on my rotations.

 There is no doubt that this is a very exciting yet uncertain point of every recent college graduate's life, but as I move on and welcome everything the future has instored for me, I keep the following quote in mind: “Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.”

Guest Blogger: 1st Rotation IMLP Maurice Williams

[Editor's Note: You may be seeing more of Maurice in our blog as time passes, as he's interested in joining our team!]