Monday marked the beginning of my career with Accenture.  I figured out my commute, and am strategically situated to take the N Judah line directly downtown.  I end up riding the train for less than 30 minutes, and walking only 2.5 blocks from my house and 3 blocks to the office.  So relative to others in the office and in the city, the commute is fairly easy going, although the trains do get fairly crowded around rush hour, which unfortunately, ends up being the times that I find myself riding.

The first few days of work have involved filling out paperwork, sitting through presentations about procedure, policies, and company values, setting up e-mail and voice-mail, ordering business cards, and  getting briefed on training protocols.  Accenture has a number of self-serve online training courses which we are required to complete, but there are some login issues with the system, so will not be able to take those until later.

The company is involved with a number of community outreach initiatives to support the community.  As such, a volunteer opportunity was offered to us new Joiners to go work at the San Francisco food bank for a few hours.  So on Wednesday, I, along with those others to chose to participate, headed over there and worked on an assembly line packing boxes for a federal program that supplies food to needy senior citizens in the city.  While we were working, a major milestone way hit, and I helped pack the 500,000th box packed in the warehouse for that program.  We celebrated with a cake, followed by a rest in the break room.

On Friday, we had a breakfast event with some of the Senior Executives and some other people staffed in the office.  The SE's gave some insight about their careers, their fields of focus, and offered some encouraging words.  I was able to chat with some other people, and as I found out from talking to them, the San Francisco is more of a high-demand place than I realized.  New hires often request this office, but rarely get placed here, so I guess that's something I get feel special about.

The core of my start group is composed of 8 people (one of whom is also a BYU grad) and we make up a pretty diverse group.  We all come from a variety of academic fields, ranging from business management, to finance, to economics, to liberal arts.  We also represent a wide variety of cultural and ethnic heritages, collectively claiming heritages from all over the world, and coming from an assortment of areas in the US.The next few weeks at work are going to involve a more training than anything else.  Starting next week, we have 2 week of delivery protocol training here in San Francisco, then 2 more week of training at the Accenture training campus in St. Charles, near Chicago, Illinois.  During this time I think I’ll be getting the foundational knowledge and skills that will empower me to be a valuable employee here.  Upon returning from St. Charles, I think the idea is that I’ll be staffed on a project with a client, and begin the real work, but that remains to be seen.

In the meantime, I’m just taking it one day at a time, and although the initiatory procedures can get a bit mundane, I am glad to be here, am enjoying my time with the company, and hope that this will lead to some worthwhile opportunities in the future.