I Miss My Set Something Fierce

First, I’ll start with: Spring Break was awesome but super busy. A bunch of us from both sets went skiing on the Tuesday. I was pleased to find that after 10 years, I was still pretty good at it. Also on my to-do list for Spring Break:

• Write 4 articles for the APICS student chapter website
• Contact the Virginia Mason Institute to try and arrange a tour for the APICS students
• Clean up my resume (online and paper) and apply for jobs
• Clean up my inbox
• Send out invitations to the BCIT Business Operations Management Showcase
• Attend the Women in Logistics professional development dinner
• Write a Project Charter and start the Terms of Reference for our DS project
• Pick up donations for Showcase door prizes
• Design program T-shirts (because I am big, giant Ops nerd and I am happy to own that)

I got most of it done and managed to find some time to hang out with friends as well. After two years, I’m starting to get used to the busy part (I’ll even admit to enjoying it, although I could do with fewer 11 hour days).

T-Shirts for the OpMan Program, Images Courtesy of Stephen Reid (Program Head)

I’m ordering the T-shirts tonight – I did not, for the record, draw or create the characters, those are the property of the OpMan Program that our Program Head was kind enough to let me use.

My team and I sent out 1048 invitations over exam week and spring break, as well as working the local professional events, and the registration for the event is up to 70 people from 39 different companies and it’s doubled weekly for the last two weeks – fingers crossed it will do the same again in the next few days and we’ll be well on the way to our target of 200 people.

I applied for a number of jobs, I’d like to work in Healthcare or Biotech Operations but I’m trying not to limit myself too much and potentially miss an opportunity.

And… let’s see, I’m still working out the Virginia Mason trip – they seem very willing to work with us and I would really love to get an inside look at the institution that our healthcare services up here are benchmarking against. The other part of the trip is to organize something with the Boeing 747 plant in Everett, which is easier because they’re open to the public.

Skiing at Cypress Mountain at Spring Break

As for this last week, and the title of this post, we have now officially started Term 4B – which means we’ve only got 4 classes (hurray!) and our final Directed Studies (DS project) which is worth 12 credits. For the DS projects this term, we spend 3 days a week on the job site – getting all up into everybody’s business, as my project partner likes to say – working on our process improvement projects. Our project is looking at the paperwork (and I mean paper paperwork) in the office and on the plant floor of our job site with the intention of finding a way to reduce it by 90% and consequently save everybody all that paper handling time and help the company to become more green.

That’s not the only type of project that our program works with, of course. The focus of each project is based on the needs of the industry partner and can be anything from quality to supplier relationships and vendor management systems, logistics, computer systems, service levels, lean business processes, or triple bottom line profitability (AKA sustainability). That’s what I really love about this program, actually. They train us to be generalists, with a set of skills focused around critical thinking and problem solving that can be applied  anywhere, and it gives us the widest possible range of options when we graduate.

This term is one of the best parts of the program BUT… we only see our classmates Mondays and Fridays now. I miss my set, you guys! I miss the other set, too. It’s super weird, I’m used to seeing these people all day, every day and now it’s down to twice a week. Not that I’m not getting about the same amount of email but it’s not the same. On the one hand, I’m looking forward to graduation (nine weeks) and getting a job; on the other hand, I’m sad because I’m going to miss this whole experience and the people that I’ve gotten to know so well over the last two years.  Hopefully, we’ll all stay in touch, at least.