A Summer of Soda and South Korea

Now that summer has approached the half way mark, its time for a little update for what has been happening since my last blog post. Since my last blog post, I have experienced a lot and been able to travel to some great places. I started my summer off by simply flying home to see my family and old friends from high school. The best part about going home is that you don’t really need to have anything planned; you simply go home and just enjoy being where you grew up. Another plus is being to see your old friends. I was able to see most of the people that I hold deer to my heart, but the issue with growing up is that people begin to pursue other careers that take them all over the place. I always tell people to cherish their friendships especially the ones from high school because at a certain point, a majority of your friends won’t be close to each other. For example, my two friends Spencer and Craig were not home for the week I was in Maryland because they were in Virginia waiting to see their friends graduate. Luckily, a lot of my friends either go to school in Maryland or return for the summer, so I was able to see a majority of them before I left for my next adventure.

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My next adventure was traveling with my siblings to visit another one of our brothers in the magical land of South Korea. I use magical because it just seems like it fits. Anyways, my brother Cam and I left two days before the rest of the group because I had to return early to attend new hire orientation at internship. Traveling a whole day on planes and landing in various airports might not seem fun, but I knew the trip was going to be a blast when I was having fun sitting on a plane for 18 hours and going through various airports. We watched all of the Harry potters movies and just caught up on a full day of sleep. We started off in Virginia then flew to San Francisco, next to Japan then finally South Korea; 18 total hours of traveling. Surprisingly, it went by a lot faster than you would think. The wait was definitely worth it.  Our week in South Korea was a fun-filled week of trying various Asian dishes with squid, chicken, rice, and my personal favorite dumplings. Korea isn’t known for dumplings, but a couple places still served them; they did not disappoint. Even better was the fact that all the major areas of Seoul were accessible by public transportation. We took the train everyday and missed only a few stops before we full understood the system. We visited places like Itaewon, Gangnam (Style), Myeongdong, Coex Mall and many more. Whenever, we faced a problem many of the locals were very helpful. They aren’t as loud and outgoing as Americans, but they enjoyed interacting with us. After we explored various areas of Korea, I sadly had to leave my siblings to return to America to start adult life.

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When I returned to the states, I had one extra day to get ready before I started my first day at PepsiCo. I received an offer from PepsiCo as a production intern at the Spring Career Fair and started my on-boarding process June 1st. Even though I wasn’t ready to return to doing work, I would soon learn that working at Pepsi didn’t feel like schoolwork, but rather an adventure of knowledge. Every day I go into work and learn something new whether its how they actually make soda to something simple as operating a label printer. The first couple days I just familiarized myself with the plant. I learned about the soda fillers, the soda tanks, soda bottle conveyors and almost every machine in the plant. It is wild to see how a couple ingredients and water can produce around 2400 cases of soda.  During the last couple days of the on-boarding process, I was assigned to work with one of the bay trucks that deliver cases to small stores like 7-11. I was actually moving cases of soda into stores and learned how to balance a hand truck (the tool used to moves cases inside). After two weeks of on boarding, I was ready to start my actual projects.   My first two projects I was assigned were assessing the safety of the machines, and the motions made when operating these machines. It was tedious process, but this how I familiarized myself with the entire plant. I actually finished my projects a couple weeks early; so I was able to somewhat create my own projects. My plant director and a couple other managers assigned me the tasks of tracking the spending of the glue needed for soda cases, a unit converter to understand how many cases a certain number of units makes (Pepsi has their own units for each soda), and assessing some more plant equipment. When my managers aren’t keeping me busy, I try to find more projects to work on or people to shadow; I am always trying to learn new stuff. Working at Pepsi has really just started and I don’t see my learning slowing down anytime soon. I still have another half of the summer, but as of now, I wouldn’t change my summer even a little bit.

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