First post and already I'm behind...

Hello strategy fans. My first blog post and the summer's more than half gone. My mid-summer review went well, projects are in full tilt... but I'm tripping in my rush to catch up. Breathe. Now let's start from the beginning.

(Note, I'm mostly irrelevant here - me, my background, resume, blah, blah, blah - because if anyone is actually reading this thing, you're reading it to hear about the internship experience. If you're dying to know more about me, try Google. Or check out my website: http://steps.ucdavis.edu/People/wwleighty. Or read the hurriedly prepared bio for this blog).

June 15: onboarding day at One Shell Plaza in Houston, Texas. It's hot; the AC is cold. I'm an intern with the Commercial Excellence group in Shell Chemical, but am soon to discover that I am not quite like the others. The hiring process with Shell has been slick, sleek, smooth... especially compared to my experiences with some other companies who, in their defense, were scrambling just to make sense of how to handle themselves in an economic freefall.

I had met two guys from Shell through my PhD program and applied for an internship through the Shell website. Good luck, right? Many of these websites are black holes for applications (ah yes, the value of networking revealed once again). But the Shell difference was immediately apparent. I paraphrase: "If you have applied within the last year, stop, take some more time to develop yourself, and then apply again a little later. If it has been more than a year since your last application, we will decide whether to interview you within 2 weeks, conduct the interview within 2 weeks after that, and decide whether to make an offer within 2 weeks after that." And they did, like clockwork. Two weeks after the application I got a phone call: we'd like to interview you, how's tomorrow. Then two weeks later another call: we would like you to intern with us, with a very nice salary, an official letter is in the mail.

Back to June 15th: I had been in contact with my supervisor in the weeks leading up to this day and had a clear view of my assignments for the summer. But I had only a vague notion of what Commercial Excellence meant and had spent the last 6 years thinking about the upstream energy side of Shell's business, not the downstream chemicals side. Boy was I going to learn fast...