First Day of Big Kid Life

Today was my first day of work and my alarm didn't go off this morning. Not a joke. I always use my ipod for my alarm and forgot to change the time settings to east coast time so instead of going off at 6:30 eastern as I had anticipated, my body woke up up at 7:11 eastern. I guess the alarm would have gone off, but an hour after I had intended, at 7:30. Thankfully I had everything ready to go and didn't need to stress too much over over sleeping.

The day today was fairly boring so I won't drag on with the details but hit on some of the cool stuff. Like this on the video screens (which they have all over the office with other happenings and updates)

Mug shots of the entire RA class of 2013. Can you find me?!

Neat office things/perks: All the walls are dry erase. Lunch is free on Wednesdays, this week they're catering Qudoba. There is a constant stock of cereal and milk as well as any drink you can think of and a crazy large assortment of snacks. The senior staff all have their offices on the interior of the building so the cube dwellers get the amazing view of Manhattan. Technically the levels we are on are the penthouse, because we're ballers like that.

The agenda for the day was very paperwork oriented but we did get to video conference with the company's CEO and founder. He was so excited to see all of us and see how excited we all were to start our careers. We went around the table and introduced ourselves and he had something to say to each person, he was amazingly personable. At the end he told us to give him a call or shoot him an email anytime. When I first heard this I thought, "oh yeah, sure whatever" but the HR woman who is our fearless leader for the coming weeks said we really should and that he will really respond. All throughout the day I got the impression that they really care about their employees and want to make us as happy as possible. There are a couple other cool perks we get but i'll refrain from making everyone jealous.

We got schedules for the next three weeks and it is looking like tomorrow will be an overview of the structure of the company. We have a presentation on the leadership structure, product cycle, into to CAT modeling, into to perils and yet another intro to models. They're approach to training is an iterative learning. Basically i've gathered that means they're going to tell us the same things over and over again and until we're reciting their jargon in our sleep. Wednesday and Thursday of this week is insurance school. They hire St. John's University from Queens to come and teach us in two full days all the basics of the insurance industry, how they handle risk, how they structure premiums, and how all that relates to what we're doing. Then on Friday we get our company computers!

Apparently the company has their own form of "hazing". I am proud to say that as a sorority woman I never was hazed by my sisters and think it's hilarious that my employer's version of hazing is installing software. Literally all day on Friday has been sectioned off to set up our emails, install the software the company sells, and be introduced to a training software we will be using. Eight hours of setting up a computer, yikes.

I'll leave you with pretty pictures taken off the end of a pier/park directly outside of my office.

From the end of the pier on the Hudson River looking Northeast at Manhattan

Same spot but looking Southeast at Manhattan. The tall building is the new Freedom Tower. My hotel is basically directly across the river from lower Manhattan and I see the Freedom Tower as I walk back to the hotel everyday.