To the Real World

Pardon me for stating the obvious, but this post is long overdue.

I had plans to write a long, elaborate entry right after I came home from graduation. I had a lot I wanted to talk about, from the insights I gained during the graduation ceremony, to the owl that mysteriously perched itself outside my window the night I came home from school.

Unfortunately, the past few weeks have been pretty chaotic.

And now here I am, thrown into what people call “The Real World”.

Looking back at things, at first I found it surprising that I hadn’t made a blog post in almost two months. Then I came to realize that it wasn’t very surprising at all. I haven’t even kept in touch with people in two months, let alone write in my blog.

I guess I’ve lost a few connections to friends in the process.

I suppose I should briefly outline what I’ve been doing for the past few months, so here goes.

As I’ve stated in previous entries, my entire last semester of school involved doing my Senior Design Project. It was an engineering project, so in order to avoid boring ya’ll, I’ll give you a brief description.

Myself and two of my colleagues were responsible for designing and implementing some software at a subsidiary of a billion-dollar company. The software itself was production scheduling software, so that the company could schedule their products for processing more efficiently, and more according to their own business process. Before our software was implemented, they literally had a guy who would randomly pick what got processed that day.

After a stressful semester of dealing with aggressive professors, insane mathematical models, uncooperative IT folks, poorly designed databases, and lots of red tape, my team and I managed to succeed, and we saved the company something like $250,000 annually.

That felt good…almost as good as graduating.

I spent a few weeks after graduation not doing a whole lot (I went to San Diego, that was a lot of fun), but gears shifted pretty quickly.

I’m writing this post from a hotel in Denver, Colorado, where I’m training for my new job. It’s a job with a consulting company that does stuff similar to what I did last semester, but on a drastically larger scale (well, sorta. If you really want to know the details, say so in the comments, and I’ll write more about it later). I’m only in training right now, but I’m already starting to get an idea of what’s to come. The people I’m going to work with are all young, brilliant, and (as I’ve seen already in the two-ish weeks I’ve been here) a helluva lot of fun.

That being said, my worklife is going to be pretty challenging. That’s okay though…I’d be bored without a challenge.

However, notice how I said “worklife”. My point here is that I am completely unaware of what my work-life balance is going to be like. For those of you who know me well, or have worked with me in the past, you know that I’m somewhat masochistic when it comes to getting work done, and that I have to actually force myself to get up and take a break (even to do things like eat!). It’s a bit daunting right now since I don’t really know what to expect, but my colleagues who have been at the company tell me not to worry.

There is plenty more to be said, but now that I have finished my blogging hiatus, I’ll try and post a few times a week.

Colorado sunsets are gorgeous. I’ll write more about my experiences here and post some more photos later.