My first week at 3M

My first week at 3M

   Dad and Jon helped me move up to Minneapolis on Memorial Day. We found my apartment easily without getting lost. It has four bedrooms and four bathrooms with a living room and kitchen. A very nice building. The kitchen cabinets look familiar.

   On my first day of work, I needed a little help finding where the lobby was in the right building. 3M’s campus is huge. They have something like 39 buildings. It’s almost as big as Iowa State’s campus. The first girl I met when I checked in is named Maggie. It turns out that she is my neighbor. My first day was all orientation stuff. I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement saying that I won’t talk about all the secret stuff going on at 3M. It reminds me of Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. Lots of secret stuff and only people with a golden ticket, or in my case, a badge, are allowed inside to see it. Basically, I can’t talk about a lot of the projects I’ll be working on.

   We took a tour of “the quad,” which is the four buildings that a lot of the business people work as well as the executives. Most of the other buildings outside of the quad are labs (I work in a lab). I saw some pretty cool things in the quad. 3M has an employee mall which includes shops, beauty salons, eye care centers, and more. One of the stores sells 3M products for cheap. I can get a pack of Scotch Tape rolls for, like, 25 cents. They also have a fitness center. It is huge with things like group fitness/yoga classes and spin classes. My apartment has a gym in it so I will probably use that one instead. At the end of the day we were given our laptops and sent home. Yvonne, my supervisor, told me where to meet her the next day.

    On my second day of work, Wednesday, I arrived at building 235. It is a mechanical and electrical engineer lab as well as an industrial design lab. So it has all the cool machines I got to use at Iowa State (laser cutters, 3D printers, CNC machines, etc.). I was waiting in the lobby where Yvonne told me to meet, but she was running late so a man named Peter greeted me instead. He  works in Human Factors. Peter showed me around the building and introduced me to some people. He then started to show me some project he is working on. He asked if I was interested in joining him at a meeting later that day to talk about a project. I went to the meeting and that is where I was assigned my first project. Because of the NDA that I signed, I can’t go into detail about it. My workstation is right next to Adam Carlson, another Industrial Designer at Iowa State. He is double-majoring in in IndD and Mechanical Engineering. But I know him pretty well, so I am glad I sit next to him. He has been a huge help showing me around (like where to eat lunch). He hung up the Iowa State flag. And I think that has started a war, a couple other flags have started to pop up around the office now. I get my own phone and phone number and email address. That’s all pretty neat. Here is a view of my cubical. Mom and Tootie, I just had to bring my container of Spark to work. I need one of those after lunch to keep me awake the rest of the day!

     My third day went smoothly. Peter invited me to a couple more meetings. At those meetings I was assigned two more projects. So I am working on three total projects right now. I can talk about one of them a little bit. Cavilon is an alcohol-based rub manufactured by 3M. It is flammable before it is completely dried on the skin. It was not intended to be used in the operating room, but has started to trickle in there. Long story short, I need to come up with some label designs to better warn O.R. doctors that this is a flammable product.

    Another meeting I went to with Peter was an ethnographic research class. 3M brought in teachers that don’t work at 3M to teach some of their employees how to properly conduct ethnographic research. I took a research class and learned about ethnography. It is basically the type of research you do to observe people in their natural environments and understand how they use products. The class was interesting and it was a relief that I knew a lot of what was being taught. I could contribute and actually sound like I knew what I was talking about, haha. I ate lunch with a man named Tom that day. He is one of the lead industrial designers. I like him a lot. He is funny and laid back. He talked about his crazy roommates in college.

    I finally felt settled in and comfortable by the end of the week. I was sent some emails that asked me to complete some online employee training. I got a kick out of the ergonomics training. Most of the training was based on how to adjust my chair to make it comfortable. I also got to play with Rhino 3D. This is a computer software that 3M uses and I know it is on my supply list to get for The Landing School this fall. 3M has a book about how to use Rhino, so I opened it up and this was the first page I landed on. Kind of a cool coincidence. I hope to be able to design a yacht like that with Rhino by this time next year at the Landing School.  On my free time I hope to be able to use the book and get familiar with the software throughout the summer. 

    That's all for now. I'll post again later to talk about how my first weekend went. It was fun.