Well, I started my Internship in London on monday and what an eventful week its been! Meeting new people, spending hours on the phone to Irish people who don’t have a clue what they’re doing and spending a whole day locked up in work whilst the city is put on high alert after the bombings!!!
For those that don’t know, I started working for Morgan Stanley on monday in Canary Wharf for 10 weeks in their Technology department. It looks like it’ll be an exciting few weeks.
I started on Monday and everyone joining the company met in a huge hall for a series of introductory lectures on Morgan Stanley and what they do (I still have no idea, it has something to do with the following words – Investment Banking, Equites, Fixed Income, Profit, Capitalism, etc). Anyway, in the afternoon, after the lectures, we were sent on a Matrix themed Scavenger hunt through Canary Wharf, which although fun was slightly odd (i thought) for a big banking company. (below is my team for the scavenger hunt – we came a respectable 3rd out of 10!)
On Tuesday we went to our separate divisions and met our teams with whom we would be working for the whole summer. My team is very small (5 in total – one in Toronto & us 4 English guys), I then spent the whole afternoon (til 7pm) trying to get my computer set up with the software I needed to do the work. This involved many phone calls to the Irish IT helpdesk who we have to go through in order to get things installed on our computers. Of course, as all helpdesks are, they were bloody useless and they in the end I managed to do it myself.
On Wednesday we went on a team building day to Tunbridge Wells where we got do some really cool activities. At first, we were put in teams and competed against each other to do certain tasks (like moving two nuclear waste containers without dropping them). We failed all of the tasks miserably the first few times but gained loads of points for our optimistic team spirit and we eventually completed the team race task in 2nd place! After all the team games, we were allowed to go rock climbing, drive the off-road agrocats (cool little buggies) and have a go at the lake challenge. The latter, the lake challenge, was great fun, it consisted of lots of rope bridges across a huge murky brown lake, the aim being to get across without falling in. It was remarkably easy to get across, in the end, me and another guy, Rob decided to jump in from the high wire bridge (about the height of a two storey house) which was the probably the most exhilerating part of the day!
Now we get to Thursday, a remarkable and tragic day. Thursday was meant to be my first full day of work. I arrived on the DLR at 9am and got to my desk and started on my first project. After 10 or 15 minutes, someone joked about how the just heard the underground was out of action because of a few power cuts that caused explosions. My team joked with me about how unreliable the underground was. Then after a while I got a text from Jen asking if I ok. I just shrugged this off as being a little bit paranoid – Of course I’m fine! It was only a few small explosions on one of the worlds most unreliable transport systems. Then reports of the bus came in and that’s when we realised it was more serious. As the news kept on coming on, the whole of Canary Wharf (the main finanicial and business district of the country) was blocked off to all incoming and outgoing traffic, car and rail. We were told we could not leave our offices until the police had secured the area and the situation seemed safe. I have to admit I was very nervous, especially since canary wharf is like the World Trade Center of England. However, I was more worried about a friends mum who was on one of the tubes behind one of the ones that exploded. Thankfully she is only suffering from a bit of smoke inhalation and is little shaken, but she was trapped undergound for over an hour and then locked in a cafe in Kings Cross until the police decided it was safe. I have to thank God that she’s safe and that the bombings were not as bad as those in Madrid or New York in recent times. I also hope all my friends from work got home alright because many of them lived in the north of the city and didn’t know how they were going to get home.
At least on Friday I was given the day off to spend with Milly who gave me a mini guied tour of Greenwich (where I’m staying) and we went off to the cinema to see War of The Worlds (very good!).
I haven’t got the internet (or my computer for that matter) in my halls , so I have to use an internet cafe to check my emails ad blog but hopefully I’ll be able to do some fairly regular blogging (unlike in the past few months). I hope everyone is well!!
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