McKinsey Asia BCR 2008 Day 3

I usually need up to 8 hours of sleep to feel fully refreshed. Don't know if its the excellent hotel or simply adrenaline rush that got me out of bed at 6:30am this morning, despite going to bed at almost 2am. Quick shower, then double checked everything in my luggage, said goodbye to my room of two days, took one last look out the huge window overlooking Victoria Harbor before heading downstairs to check out at the front desk.

Breakfast was the delicious buffet as usual, then me, Tiffany and San - a Summer associate staffed to TPO, we three took a taxi to Hong Kong MTR station to check in our luggage and get our boarding passes. The taxi in Hong Kong, amazingly, is cheaper than Taipei! Anyways, at the MTR station, we bought our Airport Express tickets and soon had our hands free of luggage. This in-town check in service really convenient business travelers and tourists alike. Combined with all the top notch hotels and the easy-to-get SIM card service, Hong Kong has really shaped itself along all the needs of a time efficient business traveler, no wonder it had become one of the biggest financial centers of the world.

Training was very much similar to yesterday. This trip to Hong Kong had been awesome, and full of surprises. The only bad little thing that happened was somehow, my iPhone bricked itself again when I was trying to connect to wifi in the conference room. Despite being quite seasoned at dealing with bricked iPhones, I was still very pissed off - the iPhone's instability made it not the idea handset for business purposes, despite its user friendly interface and whooping graphics. Had to restore it using iTunes and then iJailbreak for the unlock. It didn't take a long time to get it back to a functional state, but all the other 3rd party apps are gone, so are my photos (thankfully, uploaded those to iPhoto the night before). Now my iPhone can make and receive calls, send SMS, take pictures, listen to music, that's about it - the fancy maps, games and gadgets are gone, at least for the moment.

It was raining quite hard in HK for the entire day, fortunately we were all in a very nice room with air conditioning and all. The training concluded at around 5:30 with group pictures being taken, and we actually started a facebook group called 'McKinsey Asia Summers 2008' right there and then! It was really great to know so many outstanding people, even though we'd all be in various offices scattered across GCO and Singapore, I really hope this network we built in the past two days will continue to keep in touch. Anyways, after we all said our goodbyes, me, San and Tiffany hailed a cab and took the Airport Express to HKG International Airport for our evening flight back to Taipei.

Did some last minute shopping at the terminal, bought a couple of Starbucks tumblers for my girlfriend and myself. The flight tookoff amidst the rain, and the 1 hr. 20 minute flight went by really fast. Other than the kind-of-violent turbulence during the descent (which was quite scary, knowing we're already getting closer and closer to the ground as is), the flight was smooth and the food enjoyable (I'd always liked airplane food for starters). The plane actually touched down at about 10pm, got our luggage and cleared customs in another 15 minutes. As we walked out into the arrivals lobby, to our left hand side were three drivers dressed in shirt and tie holding signs that read 'McKinsey & Co.' and our names under that! It's the first time to have official pickup service at the airport, we're all (well at least I definitely am) very excited as we're being led to our respective Benz vehicles. 

The drive back to Taipei was smooth, despite feeling a little tired, I was chatting with the driver for almost the entire drive. From my own rough estimation, the firm spent almost 50,000 NT on each of us to send us to the training in HK !!!! That is some hefty investment in undergrad and summer interns! 

After this initial exposure to business traveling, I'm so much more passionate about consulting as a career, and definitely looking forward to this summer's work! It's gonna take a while for me to readjust back into 'student mode' after the past two days of luxury travel and a taste of what being a consultant is like. The accommodations are really nice, but I'm sure the kind of contribution and effort they expect from us goes hand in hand ~ better gear myself to work really hard this summer, cuz I know I'd love a career as a consulting, and working for McKinsey have always been one of my dreams!