Internship in Corporate Banking
Monday, June 25, 2012
WEEK 2
After
enduring being commuter for a week, I decided to move to a house, which is only
one hour away by city bus from work; 15 minutes if only the bus has a propeller
on top. As always, I come too early and barely have people to talk to. I
printed out my first progress report to hand to my supervisor. Early in the
day, I was called by supervisor to deliver the presentation of the report.
It was a short
presentation followed by long, detailed, and critical feedbacks from
supervisor. He gave me lots of ideas and questions to solve, truly not easy
ones. Yet he encouraged me to find the answers. He is a nice boss and also a
good teacher. I left his room saying how I wish him to be my thesis counselor. I
went back to my desk trying to sort and write down everything so that I won’t
forget them.
I had to be
absent for two days, attending a DELF test for my B1 and B2 levels. On Friday I
came to office and passed the whole day easily until I packed my bag, preparing
to go home at 7 PM, when my supervisor handed me a pile of credit proposal and
asked me to translate the whole thing written in Indonesian, into English, for
my weekend homework.
Weekend
homework! I am in heaven. I had a full day job every Saturday, so I did the
homework on Sunday. Waking up at 3 in the morning to look at figures of billion
rupiahs, trying to translate all these financial terms which I don’t even know
the meaning in Indonesian, dreaming of sleep I’ve been deprived the whole week.
The homework was done at 10 PM. That is the first night I cried on the bed
feeling like God just sent me a cloud of paradise to rest on.
WEEK 1
I did not
get a chance to sleep at all the night before my first day since I had to do a
final assignment paper of one of my courses which was due the same day. Trying to cope with a heavy
headache, I took a shower, and dressed up like a career woman. I never thought
it could take 5 hours for commuting back and forth downtown Jakarta, thanks to
the traffic jam. I slept standing on the bus and arrived at the office one hour
earlier than I should. It was Monday morning and the secretary was the only one
I saw in the office beside the custody. She let me wait for my supervisor in
the guest room.
My
supervisor is one of the group heads in Corporate Banking Dept. He seemed
friendly and determined. He introduced me to members of the group- notably,
they are mostly boys. There is only one girl other than me. Then my supervisor
interviewed me about my plan for the next 2 months. There was no cubicle left
for me, so I sat in his room that day. He did not have many tasks to give me,
and he himself was busy talking to people. I got bored and couldn’t help falling
asleep a couple times on my table. I just hope he did not notice it and stick a
bad first impression in his head about me.
I went out
for lunch with other 3 employees. I should have predicted that corporate
bankers have higher standard of living compared to college students, and they
sure eat at downtown’s nicest restaurants for lunch. I returned to the office
realizing I just spent my pocket money for the next 3 days.
My
supervisor assigned me to deliver a presentation about my project plan in front
of the whole group members. They were enthusiastic. The rest of the day turned
out to be great.
The
remainder of the first week is spent in planning project, distributing and
recapitulating questionnaire that I made, and staring at the computer, browsing
the internet about subject related or not related to my field of work, which I
called “literature study”. It was so weird that I expect I could have gotten
much more work to do rather than doing this. Depressingly, no one has the time
to train me and they were all very serious with their work. Social time was
very little.
I should
clearly re-plan things and get moving. This has to be an interesting summer. Stay
tuned.
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