Skip to main content

Penultimate Milwaukee


Immediately after arriving in Chicago on a red-eye, I was faced with a daunting (for me) 2-hour drive to Milwaukee with little sleep. Normally, I refrain from drinking coffee because I want to avoid dependence on the beverage and my sleep schedule is good enough that I don’t need it. However, on 4 hours of rest, I needed something to tide me over. So, I broke the drive into two parts – one to a Starbucks midway between Chicago and Milwaukee and then from there to our Airbnb. I went in and bought a Frappuccino, but not cream-based as I normally do. I could feel the coffee taste, which I was not fond of, so I assumed the drink would give me a caffeine boost. Later, as multiple friends informed me, I realized that a Frappuccino is pure sugar, and barely has any caffeine. But I guess the placebo effect worked, since it kept me awake till Milwaukee.

Felipe and I returned to the Midwest separately after returning to our respective homes for the July 4th break. We didn’t have any meetings on the Monday, so we were able to rest up and get ready for the three big meetings over the next few days.

In our meeting with one of the top private companies in the US, a major construction supply company, the originally scheduled 30-minute meeting stretched out to 2.5 hours. The CEO himself took two hours out of his schedule to explain the company’s philosophy and take us on a tour of the headquarters and facilities. We were really amazed by this experience because in our experiences thus far, never had an executive spent so much time answering our questions about their business. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to form a partnership with the company, but the care that they showed definitely left an imprint on us.

Milwaukee was not as successful as we would’ve liked, but we were excited to finally get to Chicago to spend the rest (and bulk) of our summer. After hitting 10 cities in 5 weeks, we were ready to settle down in one spot and spend more than 4 days in the same apartment. I was, in particular, excited by the prospect of no more driving!

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