First Day on the Job

---

Made it to New York. Left on Friday - my mom rode up with me, and we stopped in Hagerstown, MD to visit some family for the weekend. We reached the lovely town of Wappingers Falls, NY on Sunday afternoon (actually, the hotel is in Fishkill, NY - the office is about 15 minutes down the road in Wappingers Falls - both cities are very near Poughkeepsie, which is a little bigger). I'm interning with the company my dad works for (Laerdal Medical Corporation, a private Norwegian company), and we found out later that he has to be up here today and tomorrow for a meeting. So, he flew in yesterday, and my parents stayed down the hall in the same hotel. The hotel they put me up in for three weeks is really nice - I have a one-bedroom suite with a full kitchen, so it's like having a furnished apartment with maid service and free breakfast!! My first day at the office was today - I'm interning with the marketing department. Basically, my boss had me reading marketing plans for different product lines - I'll be reviewing existing marketing plans but doing research to fix gaps in the demographic information across the plans that different people have done. I'll also get to help one of the employees (who started his career with Laerdal by doing an internship) work on implementing his marketing plan. They set me up today with a "cubicle" (not really a full cubicle, more like a semi-closed off workstation), laptop computer, e-mail address, and phone/voice mail extension. Everyone at the office is really nice, and I think the internship assignment is going to be a lot of fun (challenging, but fun). I'm a little scared, but I guess that's a good thing - challenges are usually scary until you've made it through and can look back and be proud of what you accomplished.

---