Episode 30: October 2007
Highlights of the month include:
• Deb’s first college tailgate and football game
• Halloween
This month was quiet by Shorg standards, which was a refreshing change from the last few months. We were so busy with work-related activities that we left our weekends empty so that we could have some down time. I was busy with U.S. university recruiting season, which gears up in fall. I find it odd that this is the time of year that companies are frantically selecting students to join their graduate recruitment programs given that – besides the handful of students that graduate in December – the majority of students do not graduate until May of the following year. It certainly makes planning/forecasting efforts interesting!
The first weekend of the month was one of the highlights. We were able to secure tickets from a work colleague for a University of Michigan (UM) football game against Eastern Michigan at UM’s gigantic home field in Ann Arbor - famous for being the largest stadium in the U.S. We started our day by meeting at a friend’s place for breakfast before following each other to Ann Arbor (about two hours south of Midland). We arrived at the stadium two hours before the game started to an amazing sea of colors (navy blue and yellow for UM and green and white for Eastern Michigan) as far as the eye could see. Thousands of cars, RVs (motor homes/caravans), and people had descended on the area around the stadium to tailgate – a necessary start to any college football game. A tailgate can best be described as a pre-game party where everyone gathers with their friends to eat and drink before the game. Our friends, Michelle and Ed, knew some people who were tailgating so we took our beers along and graciously crashed their party for a while before the game started.
On to the game itself. I have never seen anything like this before. I couldn’t really understand the hype that was associated with college football - after all, this wasn’t even the professional league. One of the things that makes it so huge is that Americans have an amazingly strong affiliation to the school they graduated from (so it really was a lesson in graduate recruiting too), something that doesn’t really translate in Australia or Europe. So, scholars past present and future are all exceptionally keen to see their school conquer during college football season. The “Big House”, as UM’s stadium is called, holds a whopping 100,000+ fans. For this particular game, the stadium had just over 108,000! In addition to the game itself, each school has its own cheer squad and marching band that entertain and rile up the crowd before, during, and after the game. It is a sight and sound fiesta! I had a fabulous time – despite the temperature being over 90 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) and exceptionally warm in the tightly-packed crowd – and can now understand what all the hype is about. UM won the game pretty easily, but it was not their best showing of the season. Following the game, we headed into downtown Ann Arbor for a stroll through the shops and a relatively early dinner before heading back home.
During the first week of October, I took part in a two-week leadership development program in Saginaw, Michigan along with a group of Dow colleagues from around the world. The program involved a few days of lectures from some well-renowned professors on strategy and self-reflection on leadership styles. That was followed up by the participants breaking off into four teams and working on a project for the next six days. My team got a project focused on identifying how to shorten the time to gain value from a joint venture. My team’s finished products were a presentation to an auditorium full of people, whitepaper, leadership toolkit, joint venture strategy rollout proposal, and a leadership “boot camp” structure. Overall, the program was a great learning experience but involved long days and late nights for two weeks straight, with the exception of one Sunday when we got a much-needed day off. Moreover, having to take the training while trying to coordinate my team through the graduate recruiting efforts during every break I had led to a tiring couple of weeks!
While I was busy with training, Neal was volunteering his services to recruit at his undergraduate (Northwestern) and graduate (University of Michigan Business School) schools, in addition to his normal job. With me being the leader of Dow’s recruiting operations in the U.S., one might think that I forced my husband into recruiting for Dow, but in all truth, Neal was very keen to do it on his own accord. During the month, Neal traveled to Chicago twice to recruit at Northwestern for full-time and summer intern chemical engineering students. He also traveled to Ann Arbor once to recruit full-time MBA students from the University of Michigan Business School. Overall, he really enjoyed the chance to interact with students again and his trips were successful in finding candidates who were good fits for our company.
On the personal front, during the month we caught up with our friends, Andrew and Caroline as well as Sue and Rob. We also found time to join some friends at a martini bar called Stables in Bay City. The bar has a really interesting concept. The building used to be – literally – horse stables in the 1960s. So, the owners kept the structure the same but cleaned it up and converted it into a bar. Large groups can reserve a stable so that they have their own room for themselves. It is a quirky, but cool, place.
Of course, we cannot talk about October without mentioning Halloween. People go crazy for Halloween around here. They decorate their gardens and office spaces with pumpkins, ghouls, cobwebs, and ghosts. On the day itself, lots of people dress up, even at work! We were invited to a Halloween party, and we struggled mightily to decide how much to dress up. Our memories raced back to the 70s party we attended in Switzerland where we and our friend, Maria, were the only three people dressed up! Naturally, we were apprehensive about overdoing things. In the end, we decided to dress as Austin Powers (Neal) and a witch (Deb), both of which were safe choices, showed that we put some effort into putting a costume together, and were easy enough to ditch if we discovered that no one dressed up. To our surprise, we arrived at the party to find people dressed up in the most elaborate costumes!
October 6 marked the one-year anniversary of the Shorgs being in the U.S. As we read back through our adventures, we sure have covered a lot in the year! We look forward to even more US adventures. Stay tuned!
