Day 1 at Ascentium

Lets see. Today was my first day at Ascentium! I’m not going to lie the worst part of the day was the commute out there. According to TriMet it should take about 77 minutes (form downtown Portland) by multiple buses, max and streetcar. Yikes 77 minutes!! Thanks to Matt Vogel, who graciously offered me a ride, I didn’t have to stress about not knowing where I was going, bus transfers and all the hassle of Public Transportation. Theoretically by car it should take only 19 minutes. Planning to arrive fashionably early we left at 8:20 and arrived at Ascentium at 8:57. Traffic in Tigard is a royal pain!

Enough about that though. I absolutely loved it at Ascentium. The agency is located at the Lincoln Center, a pretty nice looking building.

As soon as I walked in the door I was greeted warmly by Heather, the admin. queen! She was super nice and gave me a folder FILLED with paperwork (NDA’s, W4’s, W9’s, Intern Agreements, etc...) That took very near an hour reading all the fine print and signing on the dotted lines.

After the paperwork was completed Heather gave me a tour of the agency. The agency is basically divided into three sections, well four. There is the internal section where the employees who handle the Internal/HR work have their desks, the office supplies are also stored in this area. There is the entrance where the front desk is (Heather sits here) and behind that are a series of conference rooms. We are talking real world, wooden tables, leather chairs, projection screens and wall-to-wall windows conference rooms!

To the left is where the business development employees sit. They have a nice layout of desk and the area is well lit. In the back is where the creative employees sit, in the dark might I add. This is where I spent most of my day.

After talking with Mason West, copywriter, for a bit just touching base and going over what my next two weeks will look like I was ushered into a brainstorm session.

By this time I was stoked! I actually got to sit in on a brainstorm session with people who cared about my opinions and suggestions! This was the real deal!! The brainstorming was for a local technology company who is starting a special collaboration website for IT people. I was really enjoying the group dynamic. I felt comfortable chiming in, and to really top it off, THEY LIKED MY IDEAS! This was definitely a confidence boost for the rest of the day.

After this I went and worked with a Project Manager, Annelisa Zander, who had me update an attendees list for a recent event hosted by Ascentium. This consisted of an Excel document of numerous names, titles, addresses, e-mails and phone numbers. The problem was the list had been updated by several different people so each name on the list had several incomplete entries. It was my task to sort it all into one entry per name with the completed information.

I was also given a task by Mason to start trying to organize all of the COLAB documentation pages. As you may know, the interns are required to document their experiences at COLAB. There is an average of six pages per intern so it is quite a mess for anyone trying to follow it all. Don’t worry though a fix is underway to make it easier to follow everyone’s experiences.

I took a break to capture some pictures of everyone hard at work. Trust me, people were working hard all day. Every time I looked up from my corner people were sitting there (some rocking out to their choice of music) hard at work. It was really cool to see everyone so focused. Ascentium gets my kudos for being a productive place to work!

I then followed Annelisa to the “Resource Meeting”, a weekly meeting for Project Managers, Engagaement Managers (a new title for a manager that I had never heard of before today), and other managers to discuss the current projects. This included wether or not things were behind schedule, who needed more resources to stay on schedule, who was over budget, and which teams of employees needed more hours or projects for the coming weeks. I thought a meeting of this type was super beneficial, especially with my experiences of working with students. Projects fall behind schedule all the time and it would be nice to have the opportunity to work out schedules and resources to make sure that everyone is (and has the capabilities) to stay on focused and crank out the work.

After this meeting I had the opportunity to sit down with Mason and a designer to discuss some points of interest for the Sameunderneath project. This was a helpful brainstorm session (look for the video coming soon) because I was exposed to new points of view. There were new angles to the project that I hadn’t considered before.

In all I’d have to say it was a great first day. I am jazzed (zazzed...lol) to have the chance to work at Ascentium and am really looking forward to what lays ahead.

Tomorrow’s agenda looks like:
6:30am: Buzz..Buzz Wake Up!!
8am: meeting at Freemont and 15th for a carpool to Ascentium (yay people to share the commute with)
9am: Depending on traffic, hopefully arriving at the agency
10am: Client Meeting
12pm: ish Lunch
1-?: Working, collaborating with team members, networking, brainstorming, who knows but I am sure exciting things will happen!
The rest of the day: documentation and hopefully a workout