First day of my summer internship

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Whew! I got back in from my first day at Accenture a little less than 2 hours ago and I’m feeling like I got run over. The day started so early that I was barely awake when I had to get on the train to NJ. There were about 20 of us in attendance, most of whom either came right out of undergrad or only had a year of prior work experience. We covered a lot of good information about the background and direction of Accenture, but, to be honest, a good portion of what we went over seemed pretty elementary to the other MBA interns and I, who came in with years of work experience prior to Bschool. There was one section that covered leadership, why it is needed, and what ACN’s view of it was that ran for over an hour…it was definitely good content for the youngsters to see, but it was stuff that I’d seen many times over. The people from ACN that I met were all on point and, best of all, were passionate about the type and level of work that they’ve been doing for the company. By the end of the session, I felt wiped out, but I was excited about the upcoming work I’d be doing this summer.

Everything was all good until I got on the subway and had a “Marquis, you are still a Black dude in America” moment that got me all kinds of salty. I am now officially in “hating” mode right about now. I got on the train, took a seat, and proceeded to mind my own business listening to my iPod…Mind you, I was still dressed up in business casual attire from my day at ACN, so I couldn’t have looked threatening in any way. Well, in the 9 stops between getting on the train and leaving it, four white ladies effectively killed the buzz that I had after my day of orientation. The first two ladies came on the train carrying a bunch of bags and, once they looked around the train and saw that the only empty seat in their area was beside me, they decided to stand up with all their crap rather than sit beside me. Next, a third white lady got on the train and spent 30 seconds looking around for a seat before she realized the only free seat was by me, but this one actually sat down in it…at the next stop, the lady on the other side of her got off and the lady by me immediately slid over to the empty seat. At first, I thought she was moving because she wanted to have an empty seat on each side of her, but that changed when i looked and saw that she’d moved away from me to put a seat in between us and be sitting right next to another white lady. Now, this all happened over the course of 5-6 minutes, so my jaw was damn near on the floor in amazement. The final blow was when the 4th lady came on, looked around, and sat in the empty seat beside me…at the next stop, a dude across from us got off the train and ol’ girl jumped up and made a B-line for the newly empty seat. That didn’t shock me as much as the people who she moved to sit beside…a couple of white guys who were dressed in business casual attire just like me but had such an aroma of booze and cigarettes that I felt like I was going to start feeling drunk and get a nicotine buzz. The whole situation has had me on edge for the past couple of hours because it just goes to show that some people will always form opinions about people of color, no matter how well they are dressed and how professional they are acting.

next up is a trip to Chicago tomorrow for the remainder of my orientation. All of ACN’s MBA interns are being flown there to have a chance to meet/hang with each other and get some intense training into what we need to provide value on our client projects. The recruiter for the strategy internship program emailed us earlier today with an agenda and it looks like they’ve got a bunch of dope stuff planned for us. She says that the trainers are going to have us grindin’ like crazy, but the after hours stuff should provide some much needed balance to the time that we’ll be in Chi-town. I don’t know how much of the trip is supposed to be fun and how much should be educational, but, knowing me, I’ll probably try to make it all fun and will likely leave there without picking up any of the intended information