Last week, at 6:30 in the morning, I hauled my ass out of bed to get ready. Normally for my 8am classes, I don’t shower and opt instead to contain my hair with a headband as it attempts to make its daring escape from my head and into the free world. Unfortunately, yesterday I had to get ready for an all day event through the OSU Students in Information Management club which entailed visits to two different companies and a networking dinner with the Portland Society for Information Management. Thankfully, I had laid out my slacks and jacket the night before, but I still had to go through the painful process of showering, drying, straightening, then putting my hair up to look “business casual”.
I absolutely hate the term business casual because it’s so fucking vague and it means something different in each industry (even each company). Fortunately, I had the sense to overdress for this situation since it is much easier for me to take off my jacket to dress down than to try to dress up a sloppy outfit. This was definitely the right choice as the other OSU students in the club took “business casual” to mean “I am going to wear a very nice suit and tie in the hopes that people won’t realize I spend the rest of my time in silk-screened t-shirts with dragons on them over Costco jeans” which would have made me look underdressed. It didn’t end up mattering either way because even if I had decided to wear a pair of slacks that smelled like the movie theater with a ratty sweater, I would still have looked better than the 5 students from PSU who showed up in tennis shoes, dirty hipster jeans, and sweatshirts. I guess they were under the impression that Cisco was a theme park, as I have no other explanation for why they would show up to this event dressed like that.
Our first stop was at Laika Animation Studios in Portland. In case you are like me and have never heard of them, they are the studio behind the movie Coraline. The company is owned by Phil Knight (co-founder and chairman of Nike) if he even knows he owns it, and they were the first to use stop-motion animation that was filmed in 3D. Unfortunately for them, we didn’t give a rat’s ass about film technology. Unfortunately for us, that’s all the Director of IT wanted to talk about. Rendering CGI and shade coding are fantastic topics for a tour for film or animation students, but I wonder if he thought to himself “a group of MIS students requesting a lecture from the head of IT at a company probably wants to hear about the information systems our company uses” and then decided “no, they definitely would rather hear about our render farm and which program we use” (it’s Renderman® by IBM, in case you were curious).
After two hours, we finally got to leave and head to lunch where I got stuck at a table that consisted of me, my MIS professor from last term, and my MIS professor from this term. That’s it. It was probably for the best considering they are way more interesting to talk to than the rest of the students, including the only other girl on the trip who happens to have a voice that is comparable to the sound those little metal dentist tools make against your teeth. Either way, it was an awkward lunch.
After lunch we headed to Cisco to hear their “system architects” (aka glorified salesmen) talk about how awesome Cisco was at everything. We did get to play around with their Telepresence room which is a teleconferencing system that they created and sell to companies hoping to cut down on travel costs. For some reason they put a chick from their Raleigh site on the other end who had absolutely nothing interesting or relevant to say except “we recruit for most of our positions on college campuses and we love to chat with awesome people like yourselves!”. Save it for the promo video, lady.
We then headed to Embassy Suites downtown for the Portland SIM event which included an awkward pre-dinner meet and greet, full of awkward introductions and fake enthusiasm. It was hard to breath with the thick cloud of cheesing going on by the students hoping to get their name to stick in the minds of CIOs who couldn’t give two shits about them. Luckily, dinner was served relatively soon after we got there which provided an outlet for my awkwardness. No need to fake a conversation when you’re too busy stuffing your face with bread. We also got a presentation by an executive from Regence Blue Cross of Portland about health care reform and what that means to our industry. The speech (including the Q&A or “attack and defend” portion) ran long as these things always do but afterward we loaded our asses back into the giant white van (which we valeted) and headed back to Corvallis at 50 miles per hour. Overall, I was glad I got a glimpse of the type of people that are in the IT/IS industry. It reassured me that I am not completely in over my head in this field, I just need more technical knowledge and perhaps a pocket protector.
No comments:
Post a Comment