Friday, April 22, 2005
After two weeks of sheer stress and pressure, it feels good to have finally finished and presented our individual SAS projects. It wasn’t easy for sure. Literally, my brain has never been so overworked and to think, college life (most especially my major subjects in Economics) for me was already tough. I guess there’s the added pressure of being in a different country, working with people of different nationalities and being one of only three from the Philippines to be sent here in Hong Kong. It feels like I'm representing my country ala Miss Universe (haha). Aside from having many years of experience and masters degrees under their belts, my fellow management associates (MAs) are anything but underachievers. Really, I’ve never felt this much pressure in my life. It feels as if I have to constantly prove myself and act as if I already know or understand what they’re talking about. In short, act like a K.I.A - know it all to put it bluntly (hehe). When in fact, half of the time I’m clueless. They’re all fairly nice but when it comes to work, they mean serious business. Suddenly it’s every man for himself – survival of the fittest in its truest sense.
As the culmination of two weeks of SAS programming sessions, we were given individual projects. Programming is something that I’ve never imagined learning and doing. It’s not exactly in my list of interests and it most certainly is not in my field of expertise. The lectures are fast-paced as if having the presumption that we all had some sort of background on programming already. Well, unlike my fellow MAs who have some sort of prior knowledge on the subject matter, I never had any background whatsoever so it was difficult for me to catch up and absorb as much information all at the same time. It’s even harder since I’m not as familiar yet with the ins and outs of the credit card business so I’m lost when it comes to having to formulate my own analysis framework for my program. I mean I’m barely out of school and here I am with a high pressure job where the circumstances are very different from the usual or from what one would normally expect from a fresh graduate. For someone like me who’s so laidback and uncompetitive by nature, I don’t like to be in an environment where there’s just too much stress and pressure of having to be the best and in full battle gear all the time. At the end of the day, you get so worked out and no matter how worn out you feel, you still get that feeling of dissatisfaction with everything that you've accomplished and worked so hard for.
As the culmination of two weeks of SAS programming sessions, we were given individual projects. Programming is something that I’ve never imagined learning and doing. It’s not exactly in my list of interests and it most certainly is not in my field of expertise. The lectures are fast-paced as if having the presumption that we all had some sort of background on programming already. Well, unlike my fellow MAs who have some sort of prior knowledge on the subject matter, I never had any background whatsoever so it was difficult for me to catch up and absorb as much information all at the same time. It’s even harder since I’m not as familiar yet with the ins and outs of the credit card business so I’m lost when it comes to having to formulate my own analysis framework for my program. I mean I’m barely out of school and here I am with a high pressure job where the circumstances are very different from the usual or from what one would normally expect from a fresh graduate. For someone like me who’s so laidback and uncompetitive by nature, I don’t like to be in an environment where there’s just too much stress and pressure of having to be the best and in full battle gear all the time. At the end of the day, you get so worked out and no matter how worn out you feel, you still get that feeling of dissatisfaction with everything that you've accomplished and worked so hard for.
