Skip to main content

Keeping Busy in Kansas City


Like Cincinnati, we had only scheduled a single day for meetings in Kansas City. Despite the short timeframe, we had one of our most anticipated meetings scheduled. From the moment I had clicked the link to this architectural firm, I was beyond excited to talk to them about coming to our Design Nation conference.

Their website was awe-inspiring and perfectly captured the work they have done in the past. The firm specializes in sports stadiums and event planning. As we learned in the meeting, they are involved in the planning process for the Super Bowl and designed the Tottenham Hotspurs stadium, among many others. Their offices were filled with models of modern stadiums, showcasing the different projects they had designed in the past. Both the concept of designing sports stadiums and the work itself amazed Felipe and I. That was definitely one of the coolest companies that we met with in the summer.

Though we were only working for one day in Kansas City, we stayed for the weekend as well. The extra days gave us the opportunity to relax in one of our last stops before our short July 4th break. One of the memorable meals was our dinner at Q39, a barbeque restaurant, which had an amazing brisket sandwich, and one I would definitely recommend.

After Kansas City, our next stop was Minneapolis. The only caveat was that Minneapolis is over 400 miles away from Kansas City. So on Sunday morning, we settled in for our longest drive of the summer. I was lucky that Felipe loves driving, and despite my offers, he drove the entire trip himself. We stopped a few times, but definitely much less than we would have if I was driving.

By the end of the fourth week, and our eighth city, we were both pretty burnt out and looking forward to our 4-day mini vacations. I hadn’t gone home since early February, so those five months were the longest I had been away from California, and I was ready to go back.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Revelations in Detroit

When Felipe and I arrived in Detroit two weeks ago, we encountered the first challenge of our ten weeks together this summer – renting a car. As 19-year-olds we can only legally rent a car in Michigan or New York, the reason we are starting this summer in Detroit, but that ability comes with a $50-a-day fee for underage driving. Thus, our rental car bill got an addition of $1600 and only one of us could drive. As the US citizen, and at the time, the only one legally able to work due to visa issues, I took on that role. I quickly realized that I absolutely hated driving more than an hour. On Monday, a drive to the Dow Chemical headquarters in Midland took two hours each way and left me feeling completely exhausted. By Thursday, I had given up on driving solo the whole summer, and we went back to Thrifty to add Felipe as a secondary driver. Other than the challenges of driving, Detroit was amazing. We came in with low expectations for the area, and left completely astound
1 comment
Read more

Prosperous Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh is a particularly important city for the Midwest region of Corporate Contacts because there are a lot of longstanding partners in the city. Some of the people that we met with had been donating to and participating in Business Today for over 10 years. Those longstanding partnerships are extremely important to continue, so we were excited for the meetings, but also slightly scared that we might be the ones to break the streak. Luckily, we had great meetings with all of the Pittsburgh companies that had sponsored Business Today in the past. A lot of times the meetings with these longstanding partners ended up being short updates about Business Today and then long conversations about their careers and jobs. One of the more entertaining meetings was part of a running joke between two Princeton alumni in charge of separate financial companies. The first one of the two that we met told me to ask the other if their company was going to “ break the buck ” (
Post a Comment
Read more

Modern Minneapolis

A daily dilemma for Felipe and I was attire. Technically, every meeting that we were attending were with business professionals, so business formal would seem to be the obvious choice. However, the Midwest has varying standards of formality in every company. The executives that we met with had a sliding spectrum of dress, from full suits down to polos and khakis. Thus, while we started out wearing suits and ties in Detroit, we later only went full business formal when meeting with investment banks and some of the top companies. Minneapolis was a perfect illustration of us being overdressed for meetings. We walked into a meeting with a big investment bank in formal attire in 90-degree weather and the CEO came in wearing a polo. The week before 4 th of July in Minneapolis is the ideal time for everyone to head to the lake, so the offices that we visited were all pretty empty. Since we were there only for the three days right before July 4 th , we were only able to
Post a Comment
Read more