Day 1 (June 14, 2010)

Today I was introduced to the Rockwell Collins culture through the regular new employee orientation process. I was in a room with about 30 other new employees. Some of these new employees were internship and co-op employees with other companies.

I had some great conversation with newly hired engineers (Steve S.), one of which wants to discuss my externship opportunity with me. His wife is in the educational outreach for her company (I do not recall the name at this time) and could potentially be interested in a connection with this program. I’ll make note of any future conversation with him about this program. He suggested lunch in a couple weeks, so we’ll hopefully he follows through.

My orientation to the Rockwell Collins culture has been easy so far. The emphasis on ethics during the orientation was similar to the policy and expectation at my previous employer, AEGON. It would be wonderful to be able to have a similar code of ethics emphasis and training (perhaps we did in college, I just do not recall) for teachers. If we could implement the code down to the student level, that would be all the better.

I spent the afternoon watching online Ethics Training videos. They bring up some interesting scenarios that are not always easy to determine to immediate proper course of action. It was educational, but for the most part will not pertain to me in terms of customer contact.

The building I work in is huge and easy to get lost in. My immediate supervisor (Jen Waskow) gave me a tour of the building and even treated me to lunch in the cafeteria. She introduced me to her immediate Reports (people I am anticipating working with at least occasionally) and one of her supervisors (Michael Molacek). I will be working with Michael on one of the three statistical analyses projects they will have for Ryan and me. Note: Ryan’s first day has been delayed 1 week, so hopefully I’ll be able to get him up to speed when he gets here.

One of the projects Jen explained to me sounded very simple if all the data is corroborated easily, but I’m getting some indications that just orientating the data into a usable form may be the challenge.

Another project Jen explained to me (Michael’s project) it seems will be using Multi-vitiate data. That is just short of an AP Statistics curriculum item, so I’ll go back and read that chapter in the text book tomorrow (Chapter 14 – for some reason I remember the chapter).

Just before the end of the day, Jen suggested I Google “Business Process Metrics” to get me up to speed on some of the topics we will be looking at over the next few weeks.