International MBA Program
Chris Childers' Internship Web Journal
Chris Childers
IMBA Class of 2007
PPG in Melbourne, Australia
christopher_childers@moore.sc.edu
4th Journal Entry:
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Me petting a kangaroo at Dreamworld |
Well, as you might have been able to tell by the slow down of my entries things really began to get busy both at work and outside of work. Since the last time I posted I have been fortunate enough to do a little bit of traveling. First, I was off to the Gold Coast which is north of Brisbane in the northwestern state of Queensland. One of my responsibilities at PPG was as a member of the organizational committee for the annual Refinish division sales conference for PPG ANZ. The conference gave me a great opportunity to show the entire sales force the program that I have been developing and get vital feedback. That feedback helped me to finalize the details of what would be included in the program, and the enthusiasm shown by the conference delegates added a lot of credibility and ensured that the program would be implemented. The conference, however, was not all work. One evening we went by boat to an island for a luau style dinner and as an added bonus to the night a young wild kangaroo hopped up to where we were eating and I, being the brave soul that I am, got it to eat out of my hand.
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Making new friends at Dreamworld |
Better yet, the next day a work mate and I were able to get away and go to one of the theme parks on the Gold Coast, Dreamworld. I love theme parks and rides so this was a perfect way to spend an afternoon. Plus, they have an area with Australian wildlife as well so I was able to get up close with another kangaroo. Dreamworld also is the home to one of my favorite Australian shows, Big Brother, and while I was there I got to see the house, the stage where the eviction shows are filmed and I met two recently evicted housemates.
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The Sydney Harbor Bridge |
The week after the conference a friend from the US came to see me and I finally got the opportunity to do what I felt was the unthinkable. I rented a car. Now, I fancy myself a good driver, but even after three months riding in cars here I was petrified to try my hand at driving on the left side of the road. Over the course of the weekend I am proud to say that I drove all around the busy streets of Melbourne and over 100 km up the twisty two lane Great Ocean Road without a single accident, and only twice did I make a turn and end up on the wrong side of the road. After that adventure the next weekend my friend and I flew up to Sydney. I have to say now that there is a bit of a rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney. Before I left everyone at work warned me that the people in Sydney are not friendly and that really they couldn’t imagine why I would go there. They said they were kidding, but I am not so sure. So, with a bit of bias I was off to Sydney.
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The Sydney Opera House |
I have to say that Sydney is a beautiful city and you can’t beat the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, but I think that the time I have spent in Melbourne has definitely won me over, and much to the delight of my work mates I definitely prefer Melbourne. Melbourne is simply much more livable and has so much culture and history. I have loved my time here and this affection I feel for Melbourne is making it a very hard to know that in only one week’s time I will be saying goodbye.
3rd Journal Entry:
It’s been another two weeks! Time is really flying.
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One of the famous Melbourne Trams at the corner of Chapel St. and Toorak Rd. in
the heart of South Yarra.
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The Central Business District of Melbourne from the South Bank of the Yarra River. |
Today is the last day for the current Marketing Coordinator as she is going on maternity leave for 12 months. So, to say goodbye we had an extended morning tea. This was an excellent opportunity for the people in the office to have a little fun with the American. They had a massive amount of food brought in for the event, most of which was typical Australian fare. I was then coerced, guilted, and shamed into trying all of it. I started innocently enough with a scone with jam and cream. Admittedly, it did not take too much convincing to have me try this, I mean, how could a breakfast pastry with strawberry jam and whipped cream be bad? The next item on the menu was the sausage roll. This little treat is a meat mixture, mainly sausage, which is wrapped and baked in a flaky croissant like bread; basically, an Australian pig in a blanket. Once I had tasted it they then told me some of the things that are occasionally mixed in with the sausage, when I reported that there was, in fact, only sausage hidden in there the others decided to go ahead and give the sausage roll a go themselves. Finally, we had something that I have been avoiding now for a month since I arrived, a pie. When I say “pie” I am talking meat pie; ground meat with some sort of sauce baked inside a pie crust, and to top it off when you eat it you put tomato sauce (ketchup) on top. The entire office watched as I tasted this Australian staple; full of awe at the fact that I had never in my life tasted a meat pie. I must say, as anticlimactic as it is, it really wasn’t all that bad. Keep in mind I won’t soon be ordering one for myself, but generally it was not bad. So, all in all it was a good morning getting to know my co-workers. I just have to make sure to lay low for a while; they have been talking about bringing in Vegemite for me to try.
2nd Journal Entry - April 25, 2006:
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A couple of street performers enjoying the lovely autumn weather and ANZAC day crowds in Federation Square. |
I have to start this entry by saying that writing for this journal is a lot tougher than I thought it would be. Between what I am learning while working and as a tourist there are a lot of things that I want to talk about and I really just don’t know where to begin. I guess that I will start with the big event today, ANZAC Day. ANZAC Day is, as best I can tell, the equivalent of Memorial Day in the US. It commemorates the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, who first fought in World War I in 1914, only 13 years after becoming a sovereign nation. So, today Tuesday April 25th is a holiday, and I have spent the day exploring the Central Business District (CBD) and walking along the Yarra River where, as I have no barbie of my own, I bought a genuine Aussie banger (sausage), and I was not alone in this. I have gone into the CBD several times in the last two weeks, and today was a totally different experience. It seemed as though all of Melbourne was out today. There were street performers of all types out everywhere and there was a free spirited festival feel in the air. In the center of Federation Square, a large plaza in the CBD just outside of the Flinders St. train station, I stumbled across some interesting and, I must say, very talented street performers. You can see from the picture of these performers, why they might have caught my attention, it is not often that you see a man doing a hand stand on another man’s head. In the picture you can also get a feel for the style of Federation square the Metallic buildings with asymmetrical angles surround the square, which is interesting in combination with the more Victorian style buildings all around, but that seems pretty typical for Melbourne, something unexpected around every corner.
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Where I go to work everyday! |
Before coming here I knew very little about Australia. One thing I assumed was that surely it would not be long before I saw a Kangaroo, or a Wallaby, or some other cute little creature, but as I am living in a city, I have yet to come across any of these little guys. What I have seen, however, are spiders. The second night I was here, after an entire day of nonchalantly walking up and down the stairwell of my building while doing laundry, I open my door, turn and what do I see but a large, and I feel, potentially life threatening spider not two feet from my door. Granted I may not have the best constitution when it comes to spiders to start with, but here in Australia just as other animals developed differently so have spiders. Spiders here tend to be a touch more venomous. One example is the funnel web spider, which happens to be the most venomous insect in the world. On the plus side, regarding the funnel web spider, there have been no deaths related to this spider since the 80’s when an antidote was developed, but just to keep me on my toes there are at least 10 other varieties of venomous spiders in the area (I believe the one outside my door is a red-back spider). I will say that I am aware that the situation is not really that dire; as I hear it, there are hundreds of reports of spider bites each year in Australia while only maybe a dozen or so deaths.
Well, after coming to terms with the fact that I cohabitate with spiders I started my internship at PPG. My office is in Clayton which is about twenty-five minutes by train from South Yarra where I live. South Yarra, I have come to find out, is quite a nice location. One block from my apartment is the intersection of Chapel St. and Toorak Rd., which is the center of South Yarra and has some of the nicest shopping and restaurants in Melbourne. While my apartment has its downsides, such as the spiders, I realize that I couldn’t have found a better place to live. It is convenient to work and between my apartment and the train station is just about everything that I could possibly need. At PPG the people have been great; they have been extremely welcoming and have really accepted me as a colleague as opposed to just an intern. My direct Supervisor is Marketing Manager for the Refinish Division for Australia and New Zealand. I will be working on one major project and likely several minor projects related to some of the changes that he would like to implement for Australia and New Zealand (ANZ). So, for the past two weeks I have been very busy making trips out to visit distributors, touring the Clayton plant and analyzing sales data from the past few years in order to learn about PPG’s business in ANZ. I have to add here that thanks to Decision Analysis in the core I knew how to best go about analyzing the raw data they gave me.
Perhaps so far the most interesting aspect of my job has been seeing the differences between the US and Australian Industries. Before I came to the Moore School, I worked in the Auto Insurance Industry and as a result I became very familiar with how the US Auto Repair Industry operates. Not unlike the animals of Australia, the Auto Repair/Paint Industries have evolved a bit differently here as well. There are many aspects of the Industry here that are polar opposites of the Industry in the US. For example, in ANZ there are only a handful of insurance companies, and they have a great deal of power in the market, as opposed to the US where there are many insurers and they are each relatively weak. More specifically related to paint is that there are no distributors that sell only paint here in Australia; instead paint is sold along with vehicle parts through distributors associated with car dealerships. This creates an interesting dynamic while the majority of these distributors’ sales come from their parts business and so they don’t tend to spend a great deal of energy selling paint. And this, is where my main project with PPG begins, planning a program to improve the relationship, and gain a little more of the attention of the distributors’ sales force.
1st Journal Entry - April 9, 2006:
Hi! I am not exactly sure where I should begin with this. The goal is for me to document my internship experience, but first I want to share a little bit of background about myself, and how I got to Australia to start my internship. Nearly two years ago I began the process of going back to school for my MBA. In deciding which school to attend there were many important factors that I considered, but ultimately the most important was the international experience that I would have at the Moore School.Throughout my first year at Moore, I conducted an internship search. As a German Tracker, I was, at first, very focused on interning in a German speaking country so that I could further develop my language skills, but in the midst of my search I found an amazing opportunity working in Marketing for PPG in Australia. The decision to accept this position was tough, but ultimately I decided that the opportunity to experience a new country and culture was too good to pass up. Also, to make it an even more appealing choice, I was able to stop on my way to Australia and spend a week in Thailand to experience yet another very different culture and add even more to my Moore School international experience.
I left the USA on March 1 st 2006 to complete the last month of language training in Köln Germany. It was wonderful to be able to spend time with my fellow German Trackers before we scattered to all corners of the Globe for our respective Internships. At the end of our time in Germany, I still had two weeks before my internship in Melbourne began, so I took the opportunity to travel a bit. First, I went with a fellow German Tracker, Natalie Meier, to help her set up for her internship in Brussels, Belgium. She is also keeping an Internship Web Journal, so I won’t go into detail here as I am sure that she will cover Brussels very well in her Journal.
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The Golden Buddha and me! |
Next, I was off to Bangkok, Thailand. I must say that Thailand is an amazing and beautiful country. There is so much history and an interesting mix of wealth and opulence, but also a great deal of poverty. Food and lodging are very inexpensive, but most other items such as clothing are more expensive than in the US. All of that aside, the most memorable aspect of Thailand was their beautiful and interesting culture. I had the opportunity to visit several Buddhist Temples, and several local markets. The picture posted here is me and the Golden Buddha. The Golden Buddha is 10 feet tall and solid 18k gold. It is the largest gold Buddha in the world. Not far away is an interesting market, the Amulet Market, on a small street not far from the Grand Palace. Although it is very near a major tourist area, I saw only one other tourist in the Market. Amulets are small engravings of Buddha or other important figures in the Buddhist faith, and they are believed to have powers that vary based on what image they have and who made them. In the Market there were many Monks carefully inspecting Amulets. To be honest, as an obvious tourist, I quickly began to feel a bit like an intruder in this area and did not stay too long, but I was grateful to have found it and seen a snapshot of real Thai culture.
And now I am in Melbourne! Due to a strict visa limitation limiting my stay in Australia to only four months, I knew that I would have only one weekend in Australia before the start of my Internship, so I made a great effort to secure an apartment before I arrived. Thus, after arriving in Melbourne, I was able to go straight to the apartment that will be my home for the next 4 months. I have spent the remainder of the weekend getting settled and doing little things like investigating the public transit system, figuring out the best way to get to work, finding the closest grocery store and getting all of my laundry done. It has been quite a journey beginning with the initial research on MBA programs. Now I am on the other side of the world putting my work experience and the things that I have learned in my first year core coursework to use. Tomorrow I begin my next challenge as a Marketing Intern at PPG Australia.