"Drive your life like it's stolen."

WEEK 25 (November 28-December 4)

Monday morning is filled with an obscene amount of meetings. I spend my morning actually skipping my one and a half hour safety PMT meeting to work on my boss’ bids and proposal budget tracking slides for the November Ops Council meeting this afternoon. I really like putting these slides together because it involves getting inputs from a Finance co-op upstairs.

At 10:00am I head upstairs for a meeting with one of  LTTD's former Senior Financial Analysts. He has graciously agreed to meet with me to go over my proposal checklist and provide his inputs even though he has technically moved on to another position. He agrees to send me a checklist he helped to put together to supplement the one I’m creating.

I have a couple of hours after that to work on assignments, meet with my boss to discuss my remaining three weeks at GE and inhale some food at my desk before my meeting with the Manufacturing Programs Leader to go over his portion of the checklist. He also gives me a ton of new information to go on and I leave his cube promising to send him an updated version as soon as possible.

Next I all but run upstairs for our bi-monthly Team Time meeting where I learn all about the offerings provided by the Health Center (including massage therapy and a nutritionist – nice!) as well as some compliance updates.

I get back to my desk with just 30 minutes to spare before the November Ops Council meeting. This is one of my favorite meetings because all of the managers/directors from different departments present a couple of slides (nice and concise) to our General Manager. Topics range from safety to spares to bids and proposals budgets. It’s a really great opportunity for me to get a flavor for the plethora of activities that it takes to make this department run smoothly.

The rest of the day is spent prepping information for both my GE and Northeastern processing-out documents (including a mandatory review sheet and corporate residency profile write-up for the Career Center) and laying out my tasks for tomorrow.

When I get home that night I force myself to grab some groceries as my break (so thrilling, isn’t it?) and then it’s right to work on my Finale case write-up for Market Research. Let me just say I truly admire individuals in the part-time program because it is exceedingly difficult to concentrate on work and assignments after a nine-hour day of work plus two-hours of commuting. Ugh! At least the assignment appears to be coming along alright.

I close out the night with a phone call to my boyfriend. It’s our three-year anniversary today! While it may not have been the most exciting way to celebrate, the distance makes this the best we can do.

Tuesday is a busy day as well, though mostly with processing-out/Northeastern tasks.

I start out my morning working on a set of three goals for my boss to use for my Northeastern Career Center exit review. He seems happy with them and says he’ll inform me of any edits. Next it’s on to working on my corporate residency profile summary for the Career Center. They will use this in their ‘Profiles of Success’ book that describes every students’ co-op experience for distribution to future MBA classes and employers. It’s funny how, when I started GE, I was a bit worried about having enough work to put down on my resume and now, I can’t seem to keep the 400-word summary below 700! I guess this is a good thing? Time for some editing.

Around lunch time I hop over to the desk of the TF34 upgrades manager to review edits we received from the reclamation vendor on the reclamation checklist I sent out last week. I’m glad to see that the vendor took the time to carefully review his section and provide helpful feedback. Editing will take some time but it’s a good start.

I get an e-mail from my boss after lunch requesting some additional information for the Bids and Proposals DAN tracker I sent him yesterday. DANs are codes we use to charge work for projects. It is critical to charge work to the appropriate DAN to be accurate in budgeting and charging clients. He has asked me to do some more digging and get the ‘parent’, or overarching DAN numbers, for each DAN listed. Confused? Yeah, so was I.

I spend much of the remaining afternoon working on the DAN tracker, reclamation checklist edits and some processing-out material for GE including a set of slides for a co-op report-out and the first draft of my final process appraisal workflow step which involves analyzing my growth values and goal completion.

That night I head to the Northeastern health clinic to get my aching knee checked out in preparation for my Europe trip. I’ll be walking a ton and don’t want to be in pain. Unfortunately, they refer me to a specialist and I schedule an appointment to come back Friday. I’ll have to miss work in the morning, which I hate, but this doctor keeps lazy hours and it’s the best I can do to snag the 8:20am slot.

The rest of the night is spent working on my Finale case for Market Research. With the aid of Google Docs my teammate and I make some great progress. 

Wednesday, while sparse with meetings, is busy none the less. I begin my morning finishing up my corporate residency profile write-up for the Career Center and getting it approved by my boss. This is followed by putting some more work into my final process appraisal workflow step.

After co-op stuff is done I move on to making the requested edits to the reclamation checklist that I received from our vendor. While it’s a bit arduous to go through the whole document with edits, it’s nice to know that someone outside of GE sees value in the document I created and cares enough to edit it and use it later on in their own company.

I take a break at lunch for my final *sniff* manager luncheon with the Shop Operations Executive at GE Aviation, Lynn. The food was over-the-top and included towers of Panera boxed lunches, food from the cafeteria, a huge cake and more. Going out with a bang I see. This luncheon was pretty different from all the others. The speaker barely touched upon his role/responsibilities and instead gave meaningful life lessons that included: don’t succumb to fear, be positive and my favorite "drive your life like it’s stolen".

The remainder of my day is spent updating the PBL contract matrix with a new modification, creating a visual folder map for my boss as part of my proposal streamlining project and reviewing the B&P DAN tracker I put together for him.

Before I leave I make a point to send out some follow-up emails on that parts procurement project I have been working on throughout my co-op. The project seems to have died down but I want to make sure that everything on my end is tied up before I leave in a few weeks.

That night I spend another good amount of time working on my Finale case write-up (which is due tomorrow).

Thursday is a busy day. In the morning I rush and try to finish up some of the proposal checklists I’ve been editing. I manage to complete the Engineering one and send it back for a final edit before I head upstairs to meet with a Finance co-op.

This Finance co-op is graciously helping me with a project for my boss that involves looking up DAN numbers (codes we use to charge work to) in a software program called EMCS. She looks up all the DAN numbers and their overarching parent numbers and beautifully places them in an organizational chart. It looks like a ton of work and I feel bad that I can’t be of more help (what with my non-existent access to the program) so I just thank her for all of her efforts.

When I return to my desk I plug away at another segment of my proposal checklist, this time the Finance one. I incorporate all of the edits the former LTTD Financial Analyst suggests, including a checklist of his own that he created a while ago and send it off to him for a final stamp of approval.

I take a short break from checklists to send out a request for some help with my LD3- yes, the Living Document continues to, well, live. I can’t believe that the TF34 Upgrades Program Manager gets the questionnaire I sent him back to me so quickly! I’m really grateful for the input as it will add some serious weight to my document. While LD isn’t due until after the break, remember I will be sans technology for three weeks while I jet-set across Europe and Northern Africa so I’m making it a point to be (nearly) finished with it before I leave.

After lunch it’s time to head to the PM Council meeting where we continue to discuss process improvements to hardware returns and broach a new topic: Ops and SII. I actually pipe up in this meeting, though whether I said anything of value I cannot discern.

The remainder of my day is spent working on yet another proposal checklist- this time industrial cooperation (where we allow another country to manufacture parts of our engine in their country).

Class that night is awesome! We discuss our Finale case write-ups and have the current President of Survey on the Spot (Finale used their services in our case) as a guest speaker. What is even cooler is that he was the former CMO of Dunkin’ Donuts! Gah! I die! I, of course, stalk him after class, exchange business cards and ask if we could set up an information interview. He agrees! On top of that my professor explains that she has several connections at the company and offers to put me in touch with them! Yes! When I get home that night I shoot of an e-mail to the President of Survey on the Spot and request to be ‘linked’ to him on LinkedIn.

Friday is the day I've been waiting weeks for: the GE LTTD holiday party! But before I can celebrate at  the Black Swan Country Club, I still have my work and a doctor's appointment.

That morning I get to sleep in a little as I have a doctor’s appointment at 8:20am and will be coming into work late. My knee has been finicky and bothering me lately so I decided to get it checked out. Unfortunately, it turns out I’ve done some damage to the cartilage. Luckily, the specialist offers some non-surgical suggestions to try first including shoe inserts, a knee brace and physical therapy. I hope those work because I really don’t want to get arthroscopic surgery…

I manage to get to work by 9:30am that morning and immediately get going. Because of my late start and my early departure for the holiday party I only have so much time to get all my obligations done.

I finish up my Northeastern residency profile, get the stamp of approval on it from my boss and send that off to my career adviser. I also submit my final process appraisal workflow! How crazy! I can’t believe my 27 weeks at GE is coming to a close. Now my boss will review this final appraisal step, grade me and go over the results with me before I leave. I also manage to update my final checklist and send that off for a final review to the Manufacturing Programs Leader.

After handling that I have just enough time to send off my PAMS questionnaire for LD3 to another manager in my department who has graciously agreed to help me out with it.  This will make for some great material for my LD3 which I am set on beginning to write this weekend.

I leave work around 3:30pm in order to get back to the city and change before my date for the GE holiday party, a friend from school, picks me up at 5:15pm.

Behold the battery-operated glory that is my Yankee swap gift!

The holiday party is wonderful! There were just the right amount of people, an open bar, a good three-course dinner and more! We all quite enjoyed the Yankee Swap game as well, though the gift I ended up with (a battery-operated candle with birds and glitter), was decidedly ‘take it to the car’ material. But not to worry because we all got huge gift baskets to take home (I picked up one overflowing with Lindt chocolates) Win!

My weekend is the first in a long time where nothing exciting at all happens. I spend a good 3.5 hours each day at the library working on a group project for Market Research, my blog and LD3. I manage to prepare a bit more for my Europe trip by printing out all of my reservations, pulling out my backpacking gear from the nooks and crannies of my apartment and starting to lay out a checklist of things I will need. Other than that it’s errands, homework and sleep. I’m glad to have had such a productive weekend (even if it wasn’t that fun) because I only get one more before I jet off to Europe for three weeks.

*The view expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of GE Aviation, Northeastern University, their staff, employees or affiliates.