Liz Milam, alumna (class of ’11), Bay Area, CA
I started writing a blog post way back in June as I was sitting in an airport waiting for my flight from Plano, TX to Oakland, CA. I was returning home to the Bay Area from my very first business trip (!!!) and thought to myself, “How cool would it be to be able to say I was writing this post from my first business trip!?” Well, my lack of drive and sleep foiled that plan, so here I am writing to you now, with the hope that I won’t be writing to you in a few months talking of this foiled plan.
Since I’ve graduated, I’ve been alternately quite busy and quite lazy. The weekend after graduation I went to Las Vegas to celebrate my cousin’s bachelorette party. At the time I didn’t think it could have come at a better time. I then relaxed and did next to nothing before starting work on June 6th. I’m very lucky to have found this job – I’m working in Human Resources at McAfee, Inc. in Santa Clara, CA. McAfee is an antivirus software company, though my engineer friends would cringe if they heard me say that. Evidently “we’re so much more than an AV company – we’re in the cloud!” Well while my engineering skills and technical know-how have not improved since joining McAfee, I do now see the value in security software. Excuse me while I nerd out for a second: Did you know that hackers now have the ability to hack into insulin pumps carried by patients? This means that if an important dignitary or person of interest required an insulin pump, hackers could remotely turn off the pump and cause serious damage, if not death. Crazy!
I say I am lucky to have found this job at McAfee, and I am because HR is actually what I want to do. After freshmen year at UPS I interned with McAfee in HR for the summer, and each summer after that, I came back to McAfee to intern. I was fortunate that they offered me a full-time position upon graduating, and I just passed my 3-month anniversary this week. At McAfee, there’s a 3-month “introductory period” where employees can be terminated or can leave with no questions asked. I joked to all my coworkers that I passed this mark so they now have to have a reason to fire me. 🙂
I am also lucky to have started with McAfee because not only did I already knew a lot of the people I was working with, I also knew the culture and the job. While I have many more responsibilities now than when I interned, I started with a good idea about the types of things I’d be doing and how to do them. That said, I can’t tell you how much I’ve learned on the job. However, there’s also been a few oops moments. Take this one, for example: a couple of weeks ago I learned how to process changes in SAP, for example manager changes, title changes, and organization creations. In the process of making a change, I accidently terminated an employee. It’s funny to me now (effectively, I fired someone on accident), but I was sweating when it happened (things are fixed now). Needless to say, there is still a lot of room for improvement, but I’m happy to report that I am constantly learning and improving.
Beyond learning more at work, I’ve been trying to get out more. It was a stark change for me to go from college life to the working life. Since my work week is largely uneventful outside of work and because I don’t know many people outside of HR at McAfee, I joined the company softball team. In fact, we have our first game tonight. I did crew in high school and at UPS, so I’m very familiar with team dynamics, and it’s something I really love and miss a lot about college. The only issue is that I don’t play softball. I’ll give you a quick overview of my softball career: I was in elementary school when it all started and it was still cute to see little kids dressed in their baseball/softball uniforms even if they couldn’t hit the ball. I didn’t progress much farther than playing with the flowers in outfield, so I was a little nervous to join the McAfee team. But I knew I needed to get out of my comfort zone. Last night I even had a little batting/catching practice, so we’ll see how tonight goes. Maybe I’ll find out I’m the next Buster Posey (may he please recover soon… the Giants need him). Or maybe not, but I’m just glad that I did something different. Any if anything – it’ll be nice to go for celebratory beers on Wednesdays.
So that’s what’s going on in my life in a nutshell. I also turned 22 this weekend, much to the surprise of my coworkers who couldn’t believe I was so young. It’s been a fun few months since graduation, and with all of the updates on Facebook about life at UPS, I was surprised to find myself nostalgic for that first week of class. Hopefully the next time I blog I’ll be able to tell you about the softball star I’ve become.