Second week check point, university talk and volcano activity

During week 1 we were able to meet with our hosts, we got a nice tour of the Campus and meetings where they gave us their vision on what they wanted to accomplish during our stay. It’s great to see how engaged they are and the passion they have. I’m certain that they are continuously improving and it’s contagious to Claudia, Jibu and Myself, we have been focused and we have had opportunities to share our knowledge with the University.

We have been already in two classes for Entrepreneurship, first on the international program with around 30 students and then on the regular program with more than 50 students talking about the importance of entrepreneurship skills and how these will help them to have their own businesses or to work for an international corporation like IBM.

Both talks were in English, on the international program as expected the students listened, got the jokes, they had good questions, so language was not a problem. But what surprised me is that on the regular class which was twice the number of students, they also were listening, laughing at the jokes, asking us good questions and this was a great surprise. I’m impressed with the maturity I’ve seen from the students on these two classes.

This has been a great experience for me, I want to thank Lecturer Handini Audita for inviting us to her classes.

We were also invited to another class on Friday but we woke up with Yogyakarta glazed by ash because there was an eruption of Mount Kelud during the night.

Check the blogs from the rest of the team, they have some good before/after pics that are worth it, I won’t upload many pictures because the bandwidth right now is not the best which is understandable, every hotel guest is probably in their rooms because it's not advisable to go outside, they are probably checking their smart phones/laptops to track the news on Mount Kelud volcanic activity.

 Teammates' blogs:

Shannon's blog
Claudia's blog
Elisa's blog
Daniel's blog
YuanYuan's blog
Jayaram's blog
Seth's blog
Rosa's blog
Nicole's blog

Auditorium "Small Medium Enterprise" and Clients Kick Off

Today we had a couple of events, during the morning a big event at the University of Gadjah Mada where several personalities talked, the focus here was to start a series of talks regarding Small Medium Enterprises, Indonesia’s IBM President, government representatives, GMU Rector and other business entrepreneurs talked and encouraged students to become future entrepreneurs.

Then after a nice Indonesian lunch, we had the kick off meeting with our clients in my case I’m going to be working with the University of Gadjah Mada which is one of the biggest and oldest here in Indonesia. We have formed smaller teams, my teammates are Claudia and Jibu, and both have a lot of experience working for IBM, I’m sure I’ll learn a lot from them.

So we are just starting, there are many things to talk with our clients, refine the SoW, priorities, meetings, schedules, etc… but overall my feeling is that they are ready to collaborate with us and make this experience a positive one.

Side note, tomorrow during the first part of the day we will have a community service assignment with 150 children at a library, we will show them the IBM kidsmart games to get them engaged and ready to return more times to the library to use the kidsmart computers.

Here some pictures of the events.

Getting ready for the air marathon

From the logistics point of view everything is ready, I have my visas for USA and Indonesia. I also have my travel e-tickets. On Wednesday January 29th during the morning I'll be traveling to Indonesia, but there is more to it. There are a few stop points between Guadalajara-Mexico(GDL) and Jogyakarta-Indonesia(JOG).
First flight, 3hrs and a half from GDL to USA-Los Angeles(LAX), here I'll check if I can get the vaccination for the typhoid fever, in GDL it seems that it's not available, I checked with the major vaccination clinics and they don't have it and haven't had it for several months, I guess it's not that popular.
Second flight, this is the long one with 15hrs and 40mins from LAX to Hong Kong(HKG), it's time to get some new food :D I hope I find something I haven't eaten, I'll have around 3 hours before I get to the next flight and I intend to have an interesting breakfast, I'll take some pics and share them here.
Third flight, 4hrs and 50mins from HKG to Jakarta-Indonesia(CGK), it's Friday, I know! if everything goes according to plan at this point I would have around 24hrs flying, after all those hours I'm going to have the big meeting and finally see in person my team mates. Here we'll stay until Sunday, we'll visit IBM's site at Jakarta and we will meet all the wonderful people that's been helping us during the past months with all the pre-work activities, tips, etc. I'll try to get a pic with them to upload it here and show you who they are.

Fourth flight, 1hr 15min from CGK to JOG, it's Sunday, arriving at my final destination Jogyakarta where I'll live for a month, I'll do my best to help, I'll learn a lot and I'm sure this experience will change my life.

My goal is to have a new post every Sunday, I'll start adding pictures from the trip to get some color on my blog.

IBM Corporate Service Corps - Volunteer work at Indonesia

During February I’ll be doing volunteer work at Indonesia, no I did not quit my job, I’m fortunate because I’ll be having this great personal experience as part of my career growth at IBM. The program is called IBM Corporate ServiceCorps and here is the link in case you want to know more about it.

I’ve been doing a lot of preparation work, some self paced reading, activities in small teams and it’s been great, it made me aware of many things that I took for granted and I had never thought about. How our lives are full of assumptions which are really different to people with other cultural backgrounds and this is only with my “Indonesia 5” teammates. I can’t even imagine what would the on site full immersion be like but I’m thrilled about it.

On my next post I’ll write about my project assignment, last week we were given an overview of the projects that our Indonesia 5 team (we are 12 IBMers) is going to be working on and who is going to be working on each particular project.

Here other voices from the #ibmcsc Indonesia 5 Team:

Shannon’s:

http://shannonjanejones.tumblr.com/

Elisa’s:

http://elisasindonesianjourney.blogspot.com/

I’m following their blogs and I’ve learned a lot of useful things to get ready for the travel, thank you girls!


**Update Jan-21, Adding Claudia's blog:
http://claudiacscexperience.wordpress.com/