God bless Texas

Well, a lot has happened since I've last written, so I'm not going to attempt to write everything all at once. To sum things up, the junior core of the Information Systems program was very busy and challenging, but I learned a lot. Needless to say, I was very happy for that school year to be over and to be able to have a little bit of a life. My sister, Kristina, and I drove home to Maryland and then took a family trip to Sweden to visit our relatives there. I really enjoyed spending time with family and seeing the beautiful scenery in southern Sweden during spring time. After a few weeks at home, I drove to San Antonio.

On the way to San Antonio, I stopped in St. Louis to visit my friend Angie, who just started nursing school there, and visited some friends from my mission in Tulsa, OK. It was really nice to see old friends there. I thoroughly enjoyed my visit with my mission president and his wife and with the White family. It was exciting to see the White kids and how much they really lived the gospel. It makes all the hard work as a missionary worth while. I also got to go to church in Cleveland, OK, my first area of assignment as a missionary almost 5 years ago.

This week, I started at USAA. So far, so good. They have great facilities and they have treated the interns very well. One of the USAA traditions is to have breakfast tacos at company meetings (a tradition I thoroughly enjoy). I am working with mainframes there, something I have never done before, so I'm learning a new operating system, a few new programming languages, and brushing up on a few languages I haven't used much.

It’s interesting because all of my friends from BYU talk about how the stuff that they learned from classes helped them in what they are doing at work, but it feels like none of my classes have helped me at all for my job. Really, when I thought about it though, they did. It made sense what they say about college how it is more to teach you how to think a certain way than give you knowledge in a certain area, so I guess my classes taught me how to learn a new language and understand technical documentation.

Friday they took us to Lackland AFB to see basic training graduation, so we got paid to go see that as part of the “military appreciation” part of our internship. They do that since the military is the client group we provide service too. I can really go for a company like USAA, because their business is run around provided excellent service to the military, not just on making a profit. So business is really run by “how can we better help military people and their families” instead of the traditional business model of “how can I make a profit and screw people over”. That is really nice for me.