Ill take Llloyds and Oxfam for $500 please?

-Where In The World Is Shay?-

And the crowd goes wild! Time for another episode! OK, well maybe not wild, but hopefully mildly entertained? Welcome back readers. It has been an eventful past week since I have been able to talk about everything that has been going on. It sure has been quite a roller coaster ride, but I hope I can slow things down a bit and give you a taste of whats been going on (I guarantee you that your taste won't be near as good as the gelato I had in Italy...sorry, getting ahead of myself). In this first post, let me take you through whats been going on with our Global Apprenticeship through Oxfam. After that, Ill describe Italy and all its beauty and maybe a few stories involving sleeping on park benches. So grab a bite to eat, strap in, and get ready. *Insert seatbelt light turning on* Back to back episodes. This is going to be good.

Last Wednesday, the entire Study Abroad group washed the tiredness from their eyes, combed their hair and got dressed in suits and headed off to London for the day. Two things were to be achieved while in London:
-Attend Lloyds of London tour
-Interview Shop Managers of Oxfam houses with new and improved surveys (Oxfam only)
For those of you who don't know what Lloyd's of London is, let me try my best to explain it. Lloyd's is the world's leading insurance market providing specialist insurance services to businesses in over 200 countries. They don't "sell" insurance, they mainly provide the market for brokers and agents to meet and insure. This building looked like something out of the future. It was about 10 stories high with countless security machines, meeting rooms with moveable walls and an outside elevator. Our abroad group was split in half and each group was given an hour and a half tour of the building. We were able to go down to the market floor during work hours and see the brokers working with the insurance agents. (The bathrooms even had a shoe polish station!) This was a great experience for us and a privilege to tour the world's leading company of market insurance.
After this, the Oxfam group was split into groups of 3 and were sent off all across London to certain shops to interview the managers with our new surveys. These surveys served the purpose of finding out how much the managers knew about the Oxfam Intranet, how often they used it, and their main use of communication. Oxfam is pushing for a more technology savy work environment, however, Oxfam's main workers are women of age 60 and above. Because of this, they prefer using technology they are comfortable with, mainly being telephone. With our analysis coming to an end and our executive summary starting, our data is slowly revealing a disconnect between the Oxfam houses and the Oxfam headquarters. I hope that during our presentation, we can convey this to the headquarters with a positive attitude.

Right now, I am currently building a mock website portal to show them for the possiblity of using, hopefully being more user friendly. We feel that if the website is easier to navigate through with main information easily accessible, it will be of more use.

I'm going to wrap this up here. Rome may have been built in a day, but this website has to be built in a few hours. Later on tonight, stay tuned for another episode. This episode was more of an update on the apprenticeship and jam-packed of information, and tonight after some G&D's ice cream and a Study Abroad cookout, I'll turn the tables a bit and give you a dip into my memories of Italy. *Insert seatbelt light turning off* You are now free to roam.

Hobey ho, and off we go...
-Shay